A hybrid feature selection scheme for unsupervised learning and its application in bearing fault diagnosis

With the development of the condition-based maintenance techniques and the consequent requirement for good machine learning methods, new challenges arise in unsupervised learning. In the real-world situations, due to the relevant features that could exhibit the real machine condition are often unknown as priori, condition monitoring systems based on unimportant features, e.g. noise, might suffer high false-alarm rates, especially when the characteristics of failures are costly or difficult to learn. Therefore, it is important to select the most representative features for unsupervised learning in fault diagnostics. In this paper, a hybrid feature selection scheme (HFS) for unsupervised learning is proposed to improve the robustness and the accuracy of fault diagnostics. It provides a general framework of the feature selection based on significance evaluation and similarity measurement with respect to the multiple clustering solutions. The effectiveness of the proposed HFS method is demonstrated by a bearing fault diagnostics application and comparison with other features selection methods.

► We develop features selection scheme for unsupervised clustering.
► We apply the proposed method to vibration signals from two experimental bearings.
► We compare the proposed method with 5 other methods.
► Performance of the proposed method relies on evaluation criterion in applications.
► The proposed method can identify the representative features.