Intelligent Fault Diagnosis Approach Based on Composite Multi-Scale Dimensionless Indicators and Affinity Propagation Clustering

In this study, a new intelligent fault diagnosis approach based on composite multi-scale dimensionless indicators (CMDIs) and affinity propagation (AP) clustering is proposed to identify working conditions of mechanical components. For this goal, CMDIs as fault features are for the first time proposed to search more informative fault information hidden in the original vibration signals and useful variational mode decomposition signals. Next, two feature evaluation methods, Fisher criterion (FC) and self-weight criterion (SW), are introduced to search the top ranked CMDIs, respectively. Subsequently, AP clustering is applied to select the important CMDIs. The most important CMDI of each cluster is chosen as the final fault feature. Finally, these important CMDIs are fed into the following supervised learning classifiers to identify working conditions of mechanical components: k-nearest neighbors, linear discriminant analysis, naive Bayesian and random forests. Two experimental examples for different fault types of mechanical components are conducted. Experimental comparison results demonstrate that the combination diagnosis model based on CMDIs-FC-AP with naive Bayesian classifier would be most suitable for complex samples with a high dimensional feature set.