A fault diagnosis method for rolling bearings in open-set domain adaptation with adversarial learning

The closed-set assumption often fails in practical industrial applications, especially considering diverse working conditions where the data distribution may differ significantly. In light of this, a domain adaptation method with adversarial learning is designed for open-set fault diagnosis. Firstly, convolutional autoencoder is developed to distill the fault features; Secondly, an unknown boundary by weighting the similarity between known and unknown classes is established, to ensure shared class alignment between domains while classifying known classes across domains and identifying unknown fault samples. Finally, the diagnostic performance is evaluated using three sets of rolling bearing datasets. The proposed method achieved average diagnostic F1-scores of 96.60%, 96.56%, and 96.62% on these datasets, respectively. The results demonstrate that the method effectively rejects unknown fault data in the target domain while aligning known classes, validating its fault diagnosis capability under the open-world assumption.