Generative knowledge-based transfer learning for few-shot health condition estimation

In the field of high-end manufacturing, it is valuable to study few-shot health condition estimation. Although transfer learning and other methods have effectively improved the ability of few-shot learning, they still cannot solve the lack of prior knowledge. In this paper, by combining data enhancement, knowledge reasoning, and transfer learning, a generative knowledge-based transfer learning model is proposed to achieve few-shot health condition estimation. First, with the effectiveness of data enhancement on machine learning, a novel batch monotonic generative adversarial network (BM-GAN) is designed for few-shot health condition data generation, which can solve the problem of insufficient data and generate simulated training data. Second, a generative knowledge-based transfer learning model is proposed with the performance advantages of the belief rule base (BRB) method on few-shot learning, which combines expert knowledge and simulated training data to obtain a generalized BRB model and then fine-tunes the generalized model with real data to obtain a dedicated BRB model. Third, through uniform sampling of NASA lithium battery data and simulating few-shot conditions, the generative transfer-belief rule base (GT-BRB) method proposed in this paper is verified to be feasible for few-shot health condition estimation and improves the estimation accuracy of the BRB method by approximately 17.3%.