Method for Fault Diagnosis of Track Circuits Based on a Time–Frequency Intelligent Network

Abstract

In response to the limitations posed by noise interference in complex environments and the narrow focus of existing diagnosis methods for jointless track circuit faults, an innovative approach is put forward in this study. It involves the application of the continuous wavelet transform (CWT) for signal preprocessing, along with the integration of a deep belief network (DBN) and a genetic algorithm (GA) to improve the least-squares support vector machine (LSSVM) model for intelligent time–frequency fault diagnosis. Initially, the raw induced voltage signals are transformed using continuous wavelet transformation resulting in wavelet time–frequency representations that combine temporal and spectral information. Subsequently, these time–frequency representations are fed into the deep belief networks, which perform semi-supervised dimensionality reduction and feature extraction, thereby uncovering distinct fault characteristics in the track circuit. Finally, the genetic algorithms are employed to improve the kernel function and penalty factor parameters of the least-squares support vector machine, thus establishing an optimal DBN-GA-LSSVM diagnostic model. Experimental validation demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed time–frequency intelligent network model by leveraging the advantages of deep belief networks in hierarchical feature extraction and the superior performance of the least-squares support vector machine in addressing high-dimensional pattern recognition problems with limited samples. The achieved accuracy rate on the testing dataset reaches an impressive 99.6%. Consequently, this comprehensive approach provides a viable solution for data-driven track circuit fault diagnosis.