Attention-enhanced conditional-diffusion-based data synthesis for data augmentation in machine fault diagnosis

Data scarcity and class imbalance are pervasive challenges in machine fault diagnosis, impeding the development and broad adaptation of accurate and reliable deep-learning-based fault detection systems. To address these issues, we propose a novel attention-enhanced conditioning-guided diffusion-based approach for synthesizing additional training data. By generating noisy motor-current signals and employing a diffusion process to reduce noise levels, we obtain synthetic data that closely resembles the statistical properties and patterns of real-world data. The quality of the synthesized samples is assessed using a four-layer, pre-trained convolutional neural network, achieving an impressive classification rate of 96.39%. This demonstrates the effectiveness of our attention-enhanced conditioned diffusion-based model in synthesizing critical features for fault detection, making it well-suited for the introduced fault detection task. To further investigate the quality of the synthesized data samples, we implement a specific training strategy that uses the generated samples as training data. The trained diffusion model generates samples per class, which are then used to train a simple four-layer convolutional neural network for fault classification. Remarkably, the model achieves an accuracy of 98.96% when evaluated with real inverter signals, indicating that the generated samples effectively capture the distribution of real data. For further evaluation, multiple scenarios are created confirming the value of the additionally synthesized samples for real-world bearing fault detection. Our approach presents a well-suited solution to the data scarcity and class imbalance problem in machine fault diagnosis. The proposed method enhances the accuracy and reliability of fault diagnosis systems, offering valuable insights for various real-world condition monitoring applications.