Fault classification on vibration data with wavelet based feature selection scheme

Fault classification based upon vibration measurements is an essential building block of a conditional based health usage monitoring system. Multiple sensors are incorporated to assure the redundancy and to achieve the desired reliability and accuracy. The shortcoming of using multiple sensors is the need to deal with a high dimensional feature set, a computationally expensive task in classification. It is vital to reduce the feature dimension via an effective feature extraction and feature selection algorithm. A simple wavelet based feature selection scheme is proposed herein, uniquely built by local discriminant bases and genetic optimization. This scheme overcomes the disadvantages faced by the existing feature selection methods by producing a generic feature set, reducing the dimensionality of features, and requiring no prior information of the problem domain. The proposed feature selection scheme is based upon the strategy of "divide and conquer" that significantly reduce the computation time without compromising the classification performance. The simulation results show the proposed feature selection scheme provides at least 65% reduction of the total number of features at no cost of the classification accuracy.