Multisource-Refined Transfer Network for Industrial Fault Diagnosis Under Domain and Category Inconsistencies

Unsupervised cross-domain fault diagnosis has been actively researched in recent years. It learns transferable features that reduce distribution inconsistency between source and target domains without target supervision. Most of the existing cross-domain fault diagnosis approaches are developed based on the consistency assumption of the source and target fault category sets. This assumption, however, is generally challenged in practice, as different working conditions can have different fault category sets. To solve the fault diagnosis problem under both domain and category inconsistencies, a multisource-refined transfer network is proposed in this article. First, a multisource-domain-refined adversarial adaptation strategy is designed to reduce the refined categorywise distribution inconsistency within each source–target domain pair. It avoids the negative transfer trap caused by conventional global-domainwise-forced alignments. Then, a multiple classifier complementation module is developed by complementing and transferring the source classifiers to the target domain to leverage different diagnostic knowledge existing in various sources. Different classifiers are complemented by the similarity scores produced by the adaptation module, and the complemented smooth predictions are used to guide the refined adaptation. Thus, the refined adversarial adaptation and the classifier complementation can benefit from each other in the training stage, yielding target-faults-discriminative and domain-refined-indistinguishable feature representations. Extensive experiments on two cases demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method when domain and category inconsistencies coexist.