A meta transfer learning method for gearbox fault diagnosis with limited data

Abstract Intelligent diagnosis of mechanical faults is an important means to guarantee the safe maintenance of equipment. Cross domain diagnosis may lack sufficient measurement data as support, and this bottleneck is particularly prominent in high-end manufacturing. This paper presents a few-shot fault diagnosis methodology based on meta transfer learning for gearbox. To be specific, firstly, the subtasks for transfer diagnosis are constructed, and then joint distribution adaptation is conducted to align the two domain distributions; secondly, through adaptive manifold regularization, the data of target working condition is further utilized to explore the potential geometric structure of the data distribution. Meta stochastic gradient descent is explored to dynamically adjust the model’s parameter based on the obtained task information to obtain better generalization performance, ultimately to achieve transfer diagnosis of gearbox faults with few samples. The effectiveness of the approach is supported by the experimental datasets of the gearbox.