Understanding and Learning Discriminant Features based on Multiattention 1DCNN for Wheelset Bearing Fault Diagnosis

Recently, deep-learning-based fault diagnosis methods have been widely studied for rolling bearings. However, these neural networks are lack of interpretability for fault diagnosis tasks. That is, how to understand and learn discriminant fault features from complex monitoring signals remains a great challenge. Considering this challenge, this article explores the use of the attention mechanism in fault diagnosis networks and designs attention module by fully considering characteristics of rolling bearing faults to enhance fault-related features and to ignore irrelevant features. Powered by the proposed attention mechanism, a multiattention one-dimensional convolutional neural network (MA1DCNN) is further proposed to diagnose wheelset bearing faults. The MA1DCNN can adaptively recalibrate features of each layer and can enhance the feature learning of fault impulses. Experimental results on the wheelset bearing dataset show that the proposed multiattention mechanism can significantly improve the discriminant feature representation, thus the MA1DCNN outperforms eight state-of-the-arts networks.