Intermediate Distribution Alignment and Its Application Into Mechanical Fault Transfer Diagnosis

Domain adaptation has been widely used for knowledge transfer. However, the aligning targets of the existing domain adaptation mechanisms dynamically vary during the training, which leads to the loss oscillation, slow convergence, and poor robustness. To overcome this main problem, a novel domain adaptation mechanism named intermediate distribution alignment (IDA) is proposed. For implementing the end-to-end diagnostic tasks, a feature extractor based on deep convolutional neural network with wide first-layer kernel is first built to fit the posterior distributions of source and target domains. Then through the KL divergence, IDA maps the learned features from the source and target domains into a specific intermediate distribution. It is proved theoretically that IDA can align the prior distributions of two domains. The proposed IDA mechanism is successfully applied to the fault transfer diagnosis of planetary gearboxes without labeled target-domain samples. The comparative results show that the proposed IDA mechanism has higher diagnostic performance than the typical domain adaptation mechanisms.