Ensemble extreme learning machines for compound-fault diagnosis of rotating machinery

Abstract The data-driven fault indicator for rotating machinery is designed to reveal the possible fault scenarios from the observed statistical vibration signals. This study develops a novel ensemble extreme learning machine (EELM) network to replace the conventional layout by combining binary classifiers (e.g., binary relevance) for compound-fault diagnosis of rotating machinery. The proposed EELMs consist of two sub-networks, namely, the first extreme learning machine (ELM) for clustering, and the second for multi-label classification. The first network generates the Euclidean distance representations from each point to every centroid with unsupervised clustering, and the second identifies potential output tags through multiple-output-node multi-label learning. Compared to the existing multi-label classifiers (e.g., multi-label radial basis function, rank support vector machine, back-propagation multi-label learning, and binary classifiers with binary relevance), the theoretical verification reveals EELMs perform the best in hamming loss, one-error, training time, and achieves the best overall evaluation for the two real-world databases (e.g., Yeast and Image). Regarding the real test for the compound-fault diagnosis of rotating machinery, this paper applies the particle swarm optimization-based variational mode decomposition to decompose the raw vibration signals into a series of intrinsic modes, and selects ten time-domain indicators and five frequency-domain statistical characteristics for feature extraction. The experimental results illustrate that the EELM-based fault diagnosis method achieves the best overall performance.