Distance-guided domain adaptation for bearing fault diagnosis under variable operating conditions

Transfer learning (TL) has demonstrated effective application in diagnosing bearing faults under varying operating conditions. The current TL methods achieve domain alignment by minimizing the variation in the marginal distribution of data between the source and target domains in the feature space. However, this approach yields incomplete similarity, leading to domain shift and a decrease in diagnostic performance. To overcome this problem, this paper proposes a new distance-guided domain adaptation method that consists of two modules: deep domain adaptive correlation alignment (Deep CORAL) combined with joint maximum mean discrepancy (JMMD) for guided domain adaptation. Deep CORAL employs nonlinear transformations to synchronize second-order statistical correlations across source and target domains, thus ensuring feature-level alignment between these domains. JMMD is utilized to align the joint distribution of input features and output labels within the activation layer in the deep network, thereby bolstering domain alignment. Building on this, we propose a network structure that merges ResNet and bidirectional long short-term memory, powered by wavelet kernels, serving as a feature extractor. This structure is designed to learn domain-invariant features and incorporates attention mechanisms to amplify important information while diminishing the impact of redundant data. An analysis of bearing experiments is used to demonstrate the effectiveness of this method, and the proposed method significantly outperforms several popular methods in diagnostic performance.