Ensemble transfer CNNs driven by multi-channel signals for fault diagnosis of rotating machinery cross working conditions

TLDR: A new decision fusion strategy is designed to flexibly fuse each individual target CNN to obtain the comprehensive result of the proposed ensemble transfer convolutional neural networks driven by multi-channel signals.

Abstract: Automatic and reliable fault diagnosis of rotating machinery cross working conditions is of practical importance. For this purpose, ensemble transfer convolutional neural networks (CNNs) driven by multi-channel signals are proposed in this paper. Firstly, a series of source CNNs modified with stochastic pooling and Leaky rectified linear unit (LReLU) are pre-trained using multi-channel signals. Secondly, the learned parameter knowledge of each individual source CNN is transferred to initialize the corresponding target CNN which is then fine-tuned by a few target training samples. Finally, a new decision fusion strategy is designed to flexibly fuse each individual target CNN to obtain the comprehensive result. The proposed method is used to analyze multi-channel signals measured from rotating machinery. The comparison result shows the superiorities of the proposed method over the existing deep transfer learning methods.