Work

An Online Learning Framework for Fault Diagnosis of Rolling Bearings Under Distribution Shifts

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: Fault diagnosis of rolling bearings is crucial for ensuring the maintenance and reliability of industrial equipment. Existing cross-domain diagnostic methods often struggle to maintain performance under evolving mechanical and environmental conditions. This limits their robustness in long-term real-world deployments. To address this, we propose a novel online learning framework that continuously adapts to distribution shifts using streaming vibration data. Specifically, the proposed framework consists of three core modules: the Feature Extraction Module that encodes raw vibration signals into low-dimensional latent representations; the Fault Sample Generation Module (comprising a generator and discriminator network) that synthesizes diverse fault samples conditioned on normal-condition data; and the Classification Module that incrementally adapts by leveraging both synthesized fault samples and streaming normal-condition signals. We also introduce a domain-shift indicator ScoreODS to dynamically control the transition between prediction and fine-tuning phases during deployment. Extensive experiments on both public and private datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the most competitive method, achieving about a 4% improvement in diagnostic accuracy and enhanced robustness for long-term fault diagnosis under distribution shifts.

Source: Mathematics

DOI: 10.3390/math13233763

Authors: Wei Li, Yuanguo Wang, Jiazhu Li, Zhihui Han, Yan Chen, Jian Chen

Institutions: Hefei University of Technology, Bengbu 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: $3,137