Investigation on the fusion reliability and cluster consistency of multivariable entropy method

Abstract Recent researches have shown that the multivariable entropy based feature extraction method can obtain better diagnosis results for fault diagnosis of planetary gearbox. However, the nature properties of multivariable entropy have still not been deeply explored: the reliability of multi-source information fusion and cluster consistency for the same fault signal. These two properties will affect the accuracy of fault diagnosis based on multivariate entropy. This paper aims to reveal the nature properties of multivariate entropy. Firstly, a rigid-flexible coupling dynamic model of a planetary gearbox is conducted to establish a pure test environment. Then the generated vibration signals are used to evaluate the fusion reliability and cluster consistency of multivariable entropy. Additionally, a new multivariable entropy feature extraction method called variational embedding refined composite multiscale diversity entropy (veRCMDE) is proposed. Finally, the simulation and experiment results show that high fusion reliability and high cluster consistency enable multivariate entropy to extract more valuable features, and the proposed veRCMDE performs the best in all experiments.