WDA: An Improved Wasserstein Distance-Based Transfer Learning Fault Diagnosis Method

With the growth of computing power, deep learning methods have recently been widely used in machine fault diagnosis. In order to realize highly efficient diagnosis accuracy, people need to know the detailed health condition of collected signals from equipment. However, in the actual situation, it is costly and time-consuming to close down machines and inspect components. This seriously impedes the practical application of data-driven diagnosis. In comparison, the full-labeled machine signals from test rigs or online datasets can be achieved easily, which is helpful for the diagnosis of real equipment. Thus, we introduced an improved Wasserstein distance-based transfer learning method (WDA), which learns transferable features between labeled and unlabeled signals from different forms of equipment. In WDA, Wasserstein distance with cosine similarity is applied to narrow the gap between signals collected from different machines. Meanwhile, we use the Kuhn– Munkres algorithm to calculate the Wasserstein distance. In order to further verify the proposed method, we developed a set of case studies, including two different mechanical parts, five transfer scenarios, and eight transfer learning fault diagnosis experiments. WDA reached an average accuracy of 93.72% in bearing fault diagnosis and 84.84% in ball screw fault diagnosis, which greatly surpasses state-of-the-art transfer learning fault diagnosis methods. In addition, comprehensive analysis and feature visualization are also presented.