Compressive Sampling and Feature Ranking Framework for Bearing Fault Classification With Vibration Signals

Failures of rolling element bearings are amongst the main causes of machines breakdowns. To prevent such breakdowns, bearing health monitoring is performed by collecting data from rotating machines, extracting features from the collected data, and applying a classifier to classify faults. To avoid the burden of much storage requirements and processing time of a tremendously large amount of vibration data, the present paper proposes a combined compressive sampling (CS)-based on multiple measurement vector (MMV) and feature ranking framework to learn optimally fewer features from a large amount of vibration data from which bearing health conditions can be classified. The CS-based on the MMV model is the first step in this framework and provides compressively sampled signals based on compressed sampling rates. In the second step, the search for the most important features of these compressively sampled signals is performed using the feature ranking and selection techniques. For that purpose, we have investigated the following: 1) two compressible representations of vibration signals that can be used within CS framework, namely, fast Fourier transform-based coefficients and thresholded Wavelet transform-based coefficients and 2) several feature ranking and selection techniques, namely, three similarity-based techniques, fisher score, Laplacian score, Relief-F; one correlation-based technique, Pearson correlation coefficients; and one independence test technique, Chi-Square (Chi-2) to select fewer features that can sufficiently represent the original vibration signals. These selected features, in combination with three of the popular classifiers-multinomial logistic regression classifier, artificial neural networks, and support vector machines, have been evaluated for the classification of bearing faults. Results show that the proposed framework achieves high classification accuracies with a limited amount of data using various combinations of methods, which outperform recently published results.