Imbalanced Fault Diagnosis of Rolling Bearing Using Enhanced Generative Adversarial Networks

Machinery fault diagnosis tasks have been well addressed when sufficient and abundant data are available. However, the data imbalance problem widely exists in real-world scenarios, which leads to the performance deterioration of fault diagnosis markedly. To solve this problem, we present a novel imbalanced fault diagnosis method based on the enhanced generative adversarial networks (GAN). By artificially generating fake samples, the proposed method can mitigate the loss caused by the lack of real fault data. Specifically, in order to improve the quality of generated samples, a new discriminator is designed using spectrum normalization (SN) strategy and a two time-scale update rule (TTUR) method is used to stabilize the training process of GAN. Then, an enhanced Wasserstein GAN with gradient penalty is developed to generate high-quality synthetic samples for the fault samples set. Finally, a deep convolutional classifier is constructed to carry out fault classification. The performance and effectiveness of the proposed method are validated on the Case Western Reserve University bearing dataset and rolling bearing dataset acquired from our laboratory. The simulation results show that the proposed method has a superior performance than other methods for imbalanced fault diagnosis tasks.