Cross-domain bearing fault diagnosis using dual-path convolutional neural networks and multi-parallel graph convolutional networks

Bearing fault diagnosis is significant in ensuring large machinery and equipment's safe and stable operation. However, inconsistent operating environments can lead to data distribution differences between source and target domains. As a result, models trained solely on source-domain data may not perform well when applied to the target domain, especially when the target-domain data is unlabeled. Existing approaches focus on improving domain adaptive methods for effective transfer learning but neglect the importance of extracting comprehensive feature information. To tackle this challenge, we present a bearing fault diagnosis approach using dual-path convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and multi-parallel graph convolutional networks (GCNs), called DPC-MGCN, which can be applied to variable working conditions. To obtain complete feature information, DPC-MGCN leverages dual-path CNNs to extract local and global features from vibration signals in both the source and target domains. The attention mechanism is subsequently applied to identify crucial features, which are converted into adjacency matrices. Multi-parallel GCNs are then employed to further explore the structural information among these features. To minimize the distribution differences between the two domains, we incorporate the multi-kernel maximum mean discrepancy (MK-MMD) domain adaptation method. By applying the DPC-MGCN approach for diagnosing bearing faults under diverse working conditions and comparing it with other methods, we demonstrate its superior performance on various datasets.