Uncertainty-Aware Deep Learning: A Promising Tool for Trustworthy Fault Diagnosis

Recently, intelligent fault diagnosis based on deep learning has been extensively investigated, exhibiting state-of-the-art performance. However, the deep learning model is often not truly trusted by users due to the lack of interpretability of “black box”, which limits its deployment in safety-critical applications. A trusted fault diagnosis system requires that the faults can be accurately diagnosed in most cases, and the human in the decision-making loop can be found to deal with the abnormal situation when the models fail. In this paper, we explore a simplified method for quantifying both aleatoric and epistemic uncertainty in deterministic networks, called SAEU. In SAEU, Multivariate Gaussian distribution is employed in the deep architecture to compensate for the shortcomings of complexity and applicability of Bayesian neural networks. Based on the SAEU, we propose a unified uncertainty-aware deep learning framework (UU-DLF) to realize the grand vision of trustworthy fault diagnosis. Moreover, our UU-DLF effectively embodies the idea of “humans in the loop”, which not only allows for manual intervention in abnormal situations of diagnostic models, but also makes corresponding improvements on existing models based on traceability analysis. Finally, two experiments conducted on the gearbox and aeroengine bevel gears are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of UU-DLF and explore the effective reasons behind.