Variable predictive model class discrimination using novel predictive models and adaptive feature selection for bearing fault identification

A complete fault diagnosis for the rolling bearing is proposed in this paper. Variable predictive model class discrimination (VPMCD) is a conventional pattern recognition method; however, in practice, when the fault diagnosis method is applied to small samples or in multi-correlative feature space, the stability of the VPM constructed based on the least squares (LS) method is not sufficient. Based on affinity propagation (AP) clustering, RReliefF, and sequential forward search, the ARSFS is proposed to select the significant subset of original feature set and to reduce the dimension and multiple correlations of the feature space. Further, this paper uses two kinds of Gaussian Neural Network, namely the Radial Basis Function Neural Network (RBF) and the Generalized Regression Neural Network (GRNN), instead of the LS method to construct predictive models of VPMCD, called AOR-VPMCD. Compared with the conventional VPMCD and its improvements, based on sufficient experiments, the entire process presented in this paper can effectively identify the fault of the rolling bearing.