Deep discriminative clustering and structural constraint for cross-domain fault diagnosis of rotating machinery

Abstract

With the rapid development of intelligent manufacturing, fault diagnostic methods based on deep learning have achieved impressive results. However, most methods require plentiful annotated samples and are based on the assumption that data from the source and target domains has the same distribution. These two conditions are difficult to satisfy in practical engineering. In light of these problems, an unsupervised domain adaptation approach named Deep Discriminative Clustering network with Structural Constraint (DDCSC) is proposed in this article. In our method, a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) module is exploited for learning feature representations of raw data. Then a softmax module is employed to simultaneously predict class probabilities and cluster assignments of the source and target data, respectively. The learnable cluster centroids are introduced into the latent feature space to alleviate the data distribution discrepancy while better capturing the discriminative structure of the target data. In addition, geometric properties of the source data in a feature space are constrained to expand the scope of each category, which facilitates to improve prediction accuracy. An information-theoretic metric is considered as the objective function of discriminative clustering. Diagnostic experiments on a rolling bearing dataset demonstrate that our approach outperforms other popular intelligent approaches and confirms the effectiveness of discriminative clustering.