Work

Optimized GRU with Self-Attention for Bearing Fault Diagnosis Using Bayesian Hyperparameter Tuning

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: Rolling bearing failures cause significant production downtime and economic losses. Traditional diagnostic methods suffer from low efficiency, suboptimal accuracy, and susceptibility to human subjectivity. To address these limitations, this paper proposes a novel bearing fault diagnosis (BFD) approach leveraging a Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) network. Key contributions include: (1) Employing Bayesian optimization to automate the search for the optimal GRU architecture (layers, hidden units) and hyperparameters (learning rate, batch size, epochs), significantly enhancing diagnostic performance (achieving 97.9% accuracy). (2) Integrating a self-attention mechanism to further improve the GRU’s feature extraction capability from vibration signals, boosting accuracy to 99.6%. (3) Demonstrating the robustness of the optimized GRU with self-attention across varying motor speeds (1772 rpm, 1750 rpm, 1730 rpm), consistently maintaining diagnostic accuracy above 97%. Comparative studies with Bayesian-optimized Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models confirm the superior accuracy (97.9% vs. 95.1% and 90.0%) and faster inference speed (0.27 s) of the proposed GRU-based method. The results validate that the combination of Bayesian optimization, GRU, and self-attention provides an efficient, accurate, and robust intelligent solution for automated BFD.

Source: Algorithms

DOI: 10.3390/a18090576

Authors: Zongchao Liu, Shuai Teng, Shaodi Wang

Institutions: Guangzhou Railway Polytechnic, Zhongyuan University of Technology, Guangzhou University

Language: English

Topic: Machine Fault Diagnosis Techniques

Subfield: Control and Systems Engineering

Field: Engineering

Domain: Physical Sciences

SDG: Industry, innovation and infrastructure

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $1,930