Multiscale Symbolic Lempel–Ziv: An Effective Feature Extraction Approach for Fault Diagnosis of Railway Vehicle Systems

In this article, a novel intelligent fault diagnosis method based on multiscale symbolic Lempel-Ziv (MSLZ) is proposed to identify several faults of railway vehicle systems (RVSs). The proposed MSLZ is essentially for the purpose of estimating the irregularity of a given time series. In the proposed MSLZ method, the symbolization and multiscale techniques are combined with Lempel-Ziv (LZ) to enhance its feature extraction ability. First, the symbolization can facilitate LZ to remove the noises and reserve the fault information. Second, multiscale analysis can extend LZ to multiple time scales, which can further enhance the description ability of dynamic characteristics. Using numerical data and experimental signals collected from RVSs, the performance of the MSLZ method is demonstrated to be sensitive to periodical impulses and robust to environmental noise. Moreover, it has been demonstrated that MSLZ has superiority in extracting fault information of the RVS compared with LZ, symbolic LZ, and multiscale LZ methods.