Comparative study of decision tree classifier and best first tree classifier for fault diagnosis of automobile hydraulic brake system using statistical features

Hydraulic brakes are the most important components in automobile. It requires advanced supervision and fault diagnosis to improve the safety of passenger, reliability and economy. Condition monitoring is one of the major division through which the reliability of such components could be monitored. The condition of the brake components can be monitored by using the vibration characteristics which will reveal the condition of the brake systems. In this paper machine learning algorithm using vibration monitoring is proposed as a possible solution to this problem. From the hydraulic brake test set up, the vibration signals were acquired by using a piezoelectric transducer and data acquisition system. C4.5 decision tree algorithm was used to extract statistical features from vibration signals. Feature selection was also carried out. Since no much of methodologies are available to find the effective number of features for a given problem, a detailed study is needed to find the best possible number of features. Hence the effect of number of features was studied by using decision tree. The selected features were classified using C4.5 decision tree algorithm and Best first decision tree algorithm with pre pruning and post pruning techniques. The results are discussed and conclusions of the study are presented.