Intelligent fault diagnosis of machines with small & imbalanced data: A state-of-the-art review and possible extensions

The research on intelligent fault diagnosis has yielded remarkable achievements based on artificial intelligence-related technologies. In engineering scenarios, machines usually work in a normal condition, which means limited fault data can be collected. Intelligent fault diagnosis with small & imbalanced data (S&I-IFD), which refers to build intelligent diagnosis models using limited machine faulty samples to achieve accurate fault identification, has been attracting the attention of researchers. Nowadays, the research on S&I-IFD has achieved fruitful results, but a review of the latest achievements is still lacking, and the future research directions are not clear enough. To address this, we review the research results on S&I-IFD and provides some future perspectives in this paper. The existing research results are divided into three categories: the data augmentation-based, the feature learning-based, and the classifier design-based. Data augmentation-based strategy improves the performance of diagnosis models by augmenting training data. Feature learning-based strategy identifies faults accurately by extracting features from small & imbalanced data. Classifier design-based strategy achieves high diagnosis accuracy by constructing classifiers suitable for small & imbalanced data. Finally, this paper points out the research challenges faced by S&I-IFD and provides some directions that may bring breakthroughs, including meta-learning and zero-shot learning.