Rolling element bearing fault diagnosis based on multi-objective optimized deep auto-encoder

Abstract Bearing fault diagnosis holds significant importance, with widespread attention focused on enhancing its accuracy and efficiency. Existing diagnostic methods based on deep learning and transfer learning typically tackle this issue by introducing new function modules and diagnostic strategies, such as attention mechanism, adversarial domain adaptation, etc. However, most studies do not consider the structure and hyperparameters optimization of the network to improve the diagnostic performance of the network itself. To address this limitation, a novel multi-objective optimized deep auto-encoder is proposed in this paper. The optimal network structure and hyperparameters is determined by a multi-objective particle swarm optimization algorithm. Crucially, the method is based on a data-driven approaches to automatically search for network structures with stronger generalization and feature extraction capabilities to address engineering problems in different scenarios. Finally, this method is examined in both multi-fault classification diagnosis and transfer diagnosis scenarios, demonstrating strong self-adaptability through experimental results. In comparison with typical deep learning fault diagnosis methods, the proposed method demonstrates higher diagnostic accuracy and superior generalization ability.