An automatic feature extraction method and its application in fault diagnosis

The main challenge of fault diagnosis is to extract excellent fault feature, but these methods usually depend on the manpower and prior knowledge. It is desirable to automatically extract useful feature from input data in an unsupervised way. Hence, an automatic feature extraction method is presented in this paper. The proposed method first captures fault feature from the raw vibration signal by sparse filtering. Considering that the learned feature is high-dimensional data which cannot achieve visualization, t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE) is further selected as the dimensionality reduction tool to map the learned feature into a three-dimensional feature vector. Consequently, the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified using gearbox and bearing experimental datas. The classification results show that the hybrid method of sparse filtering and t-SNE can well extract discriminative information from the raw vibration signal and can clearly distinguish different fault types. Through comparison analysis, it is also validated that the proposed method is superior to the other methods