Macroscopic–Microscopic Attention in LSTM Networks Based on Fusion Features for Gear Remaining Life Prediction

In the mechanical transmission system, the gear is one of the most widely used transmission components. The failure of the gear will cause serious accidents and huge economic loss. Therefore, the remaining life prediction of the gear is of great importance. In order to accurately predict the remaining life of the gear, a new type of long-short-term memory neural network with macroscopic-microscopic attention (MMA) is proposed in this article. First, some typical time-domain and frequency-domain characteristics of vibration signals are calculated, respectively, such as the maximum value, the absolute mean value, the standard deviation, the kurtosis, and so on. Then, the principal component of these characteristics is extracted by the isometric mapping method. The importance of fusional characteristic information is filtered via a proposed MMA mechanism so that the input weight of neural network data and recursive data can reach multilevel real-time amplification. With the new long short-term memory neural network, the health characteristics of gear vibration signals can be predicted based on the known fusion features. The experimental results show that this method can predict the remaining life of gears and bearings well, and it has higher prediction accuracy than the conventional prediction methods.