A Scalo Gram-Based CNN Ensemble Method With Density-Aware SMOTE Oversampling for Improving Bearing Fault Diagnosis

Machine learning (ML) based bearing fault detection is an emerging application of Artificial Intelligence (AI) that has proven its utility in effectively classifying various faults for timely measures. There are myriad studies dedicated to the effective classification of bearing faults under different conditions and experimental settings. In this study, we proposed a weighted voting ensemble (WVE) of three low-computation custom-designed convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to classify bearing faults at 48 KHz. Some of the recent studies have exploited 1-d time-series signals and time-frequency based 2-d transformations for bearing fault classification. However, 1-d signals lack contextual information and higher-dimensional interpretations whereas time-frequency based transformations provide a more appropriate, visually perceivable and explainable representation of the time and frequency changes. Therefore in this study, a scalogram based representation of the signals is leveraged for classification using the CNN. Furthermore, the class imbalance is a significant challenge that affects the modelling behavior and possibly create biases. This study provides a novel density and distance hybrid over-sampling approach namely Density-Aware SMOTE(DA-SMOTE) built upon the SMOTE methodology for a more refined representation of synthetic samples within the minority class distribution. The experimentation procedures were carried out before and after the oversampling and it was observed that the balanced dataset acquired much better accuracy then the imbalanced dataset. This is evident by the fact that the highest validation accuracy for the proposed ensemble method (WVCNN) reached at 0-HP and 1-HP reached 99.28% and 99.13% while for the over-sampled dataset the accuracy soared to 99.71% and 99.87% for 0 and 1-HP respectively. The performance was evaluated for other metrics apart from the accuracy to assess the model’s performance in terms of chance occurrences and the class wise performance.