A novel approach for bearings multiclass fault diagnosis fusing multiscale deep convolution and hybrid attention networks

Abstract Insufficient and imbalanced samples pose a significant challenge in bearing fault diagnosis, leading to low diagnosis accuracy. However, the fault characteristics of vibration signals are weak and difficult to extract when faults occur in the early stage. This paper proposes an effective fault diagnosis method that addresses small and imbalanced sample problems under noise interference. First, the number of faulty samples in the form of 1D signals is increased mainly by the sliding split sampling method. The preprocessed data are used to create 2D time–frequency diagrams using the continuous wavelet transform (CWT), which can extract effective features to improve the data quality. Subsequently, the minority samples are oversampled by combining synthetic minority oversampling technique to realize time–frequency conversion augmented oversampling. Moreover, the clustering method and random undersampling method are introduced to prevent the overfitting and underfitting problems respectively. Then, we propose a hybrid attention mechanism to enhance the extraction of effective feature information. This combination, integrating CWT with a multicolumn modified deep residual network, effectively extracts fault characteristics and suppresses noise effects. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method by comparison with other advanced methods using two case studies of bearing datasets.