An unsupervised subdomain adversarial network for remaining useful life estimation under various conditions

Abstract Domain adaptation is a transfer learning method that is widely applied for remaining useful life (RUL) prediction under different operating conditions. However, current RUL prediction methods based on domain adaptation only consider minimizing degradation feature differences, while ignoring the correlation between features and labels, which may result in significant errors in the mapping relationship between the two learned by the model, and thus reduce the accuracy of prediction. To address this issue, this paper proposes an unsupervised subdomain adversarial network (USDAN) for RUL estimation under various conditions. On the basis of traditional domain adversarial adaptation networks, the network uses temporal convolutional networks to construct the feature extractor to learn the long‐term dependencies between degradation data, and a multilinear conditioning scheme is designed to combine the features and subdomain labels as input features to the domain discriminator. Finally, with backpropagation and gradient reversal, the feature extractor is prompted to generate cross‐domain invariant features that are correlated with the labels, improving the prediction accuracy and enhancing the transferability of the network. In the experimental section, the public turbofan engine degradation dataset is used to validate the effectiveness of the network, and the comparison with other approaches demonstrates its advantages.