Ensemble empirical mode decomposition-entropy and feature selection for pantograph fault diagnosis

In this article, a fault diagnosis approach for a pantograph is developed with collected vibration data from a test rig. Ensemble empirical mode decomposition is used to decompose the signals to get intrinsic mode function, and four kinds of entropies (permu1tation entropy, approximate entropy, sample entropy, and fuzzy entropy) reflecting the working state are extracted as the inputs of the support vector machine based on particle swarm optimization algorithm support vector machine. The effect of data length, embedded dimension, and other parameters on calculation of the entropy value has also been studied. Multiple feature ranking criteria are used to select the useful features and improve the fault diagnosis accuracy of certain measurement points. Experimental results on pantograph vibration analysis have then confirmed that the proposed method provides an effective measure for pantograph diagnosis.