Hidden Markov model and nuisance attribute projection based bearing performance degradation assessment

Hidden Markov model (HMM) has been widely applied in bearing performance degradation assessment. As a machine learning-based model, its accuracy, subsequently, is dependent on the sensitivity of the features used to estimate the degradation performance of bearings. It׳s a big challenge to extract effective features which are not influenced by other qualities or attributes uncorrelated with the bearing degradation condition. In this paper, a bearing performance degradation assessment method based on HMM and nuisance attribute projection (NAP) is proposed. NAP can filter out the effect of nuisance attributes in feature space through projection. The new feature space projected by NAP is more sensitive to bearing health changes and barely influenced by other interferences occurring in operation condition. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, two different experimental databases are utilized. The results show that the combination of HMM and NAP can effectively improve the accuracy and robustness of the bearing performance degradation assessment system.