Mechanical fault diagnosis based on deep transfer learning: a review

Abstract Mechanical fault diagnosis is an important method to accurately identify the health condition of mechanical equipment and ensure its safe operation. With the advent of the era of ‘big data’, it is an inevitable trend to choose deep learning for mechanical fault diagnosis. At the same time, to improve the generalization ability of deep learning applications in different scenarios of fault diagnosis, mechanical diagnosis based on transfer learning has also been proposed and become an important branch in the field of mechanical fault diagnosis. This paper introduces the principle of transfer learning, summarizes the research and application of transfer learning in the field of fault diagnosis, discusses the shortcomings of transfer learning in the field of fault diagnosis, and discusses the future research direction of transfer learning in the field of fault diagnosis.