Anti-noise transfer adversarial convolutions with adaptive threshold for rotating machine fault diagnosis

Fault diagnosis based on deep learning (DL) has been a research hotspot in recent years. However, the current neural networks are getting larger and larger, with more and more parameters and insufficient noise resistance, making it difficult to effectively apply these methods to real working conditions. To address these issues, we propose a novel deep learning method with fewer parameters and better noise resistance based on transfer adversarial subnetwork (TAS) and channel-wise thresholds (CWT), namely, anti-noise transfer adversarial convolutions (ANTAC). In the proposed method, the original data and feature vectors are mapped to reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) and processed by maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) and Wasserstein distance (WD), which makes the method more capable to distinguish the similar features without producing any additional training parameters. Furthermore, white Gaussian noise (WGN) and the soft thresholding method with CWT are used to reduce data noise and improve the robustness and noise resistance of the network. Finally, the superiority of the proposed method is validated through experiments on different datasets, network structures and the data with different SNRs. The results show that the proposed method has better feature discrimination ability, noise resistance, and fewer parameters compared with other methods. The highest accuracy of the proposed method is 99.90% on the test set.