Data augment method for machine fault diagnosis using conditional generative adversarial networks

As a useful data augmentation technique, generative adversarial networks have been successfully applied in fault diagnosis field. But traditional generative adversarial networks can only generate one category fault signals in one time, which is time-consuming and costly. To overcome this weakness, we develop a novel fault diagnosis method which combines conditional generative adversarial networks and stacked autoencoders, and both of them are built by stacking one-dimensional full connection layers. First, conditional generative adversarial networks is used to generate artificial samples based on the frequency samples, and category labels are adopted as the conditional information to simultaneously generate different category signals. Meanwhile, spectrum normalization is added to the discriminator of conditional generative adversarial networks to enhance the model training. Then, the augmented training samples are transferred to stacked autoencoders for feature extraction and fault classification. Finally, two datasets of bearing and gearbox are employed to investigate the effectiveness of the proposed conditional generative adversarial network–stacked autoencoder method.