Rolling Bearing Fault Diagnosis Based on Multi-Source Domain Joint Structure Preservation Transfer with Autoencoder

Domain adaptation methods have been extensively studied for rolling bearing fault diagnosis under various conditions. However, some existing methods only consider the one-way embedding of original space into a low-dimensional subspace without backward validation, which leads to inaccurate embeddings of data and poor diagnostic performance. In this paper, a rolling bearing fault diagnosis method based on multi-source domain joint structure preservation transfer with autoencoder (MJSPTA) is proposed. Firstly, similar source domains are screened by inter-domain metrics; then, the high-dimensional data of both the source and target domains are projected into a shared subspace with different projection matrices, respectively, during the encoding stage. Finally, the decoding stage reconstructs the low-dimensional data back to the original high-dimensional space to minimize the reconstruction accuracy. In the shared subspace, the difference between source and target domains is reduced through distribution matching and sample weighting. Meanwhile, graph embedding theory is introduced to maximally preserve the local manifold structure of the samples during domain adaptation. Next, label propagation is used to obtain the predicted labels, and a voting mechanism ultimately determines the fault type. The effectiveness and robustness of the method are verified through a series of diagnostic tests.