An explainable AI-based fault diagnosis model for bearings.

Abstract

In this paper, an explainable AI-based fault diagnosis model for bearings is proposed with five stages, i.e., (1) a data preprocessing method based on the Stockwell Transformation Coefficient (STC) is proposed to analyze the vibration signals for variable speed and load conditions, (2) a statistical feature extraction method is introduced to capture the significance from the invariant pattern of the analyzed data by STC, (3) an explainable feature selection process is proposed by introducing a wrapper-based feature selector—Boruta, (4) a feature filtration method is considered on the top of the feature selector to avoid the multicollinearity problem, and finally, (5) an additive Shapley ex-planation followed by k-NN is proposed to diagnose and to explain the individual decision of the k-NN classifier for debugging the performance of the diagnosis model. Thus, the idea of explaina-bility is introduced for the first time in the field of bearing fault diagnosis in two steps: (a) incorpo-rating explainability to the feature selection process, and (b) interpretation of the classifier performance with respect to the selected features. The effectiveness of the proposed model is demon-strated on two different datasets obtained from separate bearing testbeds. Lastly, an assessment of several state-of-the-art fault diagnosis algorithms in rotating machinery is included