Ensemble Dilated Convolutional Neural Network and Its Application in Rotating Machinery Fault Diagnosis

Fault diagnosis of rotating machinery is an attractive yet challenging task. This paper presents a novel intelligent fault diagnosis scheme for rotating machinery based on ensemble dilated convolutional neural networks. The novel fault diagnosis framework employs a model training strategy based on early stopping optimization to ensemble several one-dimensional dilated convolutional neural networks (1D-DCNNs). By varying the dilation rate of the 1D-DCNN, different receptive fields can be obtained to extract different vibration signal features. The early stopping strategy is used as a model update threshold to prevent overfitting and save computational resources. Ensemble learning uses a weighted mechanism to combine the outputs of multiple 1D-DCNN subclassifiers with different dilation rates to obtain the final fault diagnosis. The proposed method outperforms existing state-of-the-art classical machine learning and deep learning methods in simulation studies and diagnostic experiments, demonstrating that it can thoroughly mine fault features in vibration signals. The classification results further show that the EDCNN model can effectively and accurately identify multiple faults and outperform existing fault detection techniques.