Bearing fault diagnosis via kernel matrix construction based support vector machine

A novel approach on kernel matrix construction for support vector machine (SVM) is proposed to detect rolling element bearing fault efficiently. First, multi-scale coefficient matrix is achieved by processing vibration sample signal with continuous wavelet transform (CWT). Next, singular value decomposition (SVD) is applied to calculate eigenvector from wavelet coefficient matrix as sample signal feature vector. Two kernel matrices i.e. training kernel and predicting kernel, are then constructed in a novel way, which can reveal intrinsic similarity among samples and make it feasible to solve nonlinear classification problems in a high dimensional feature space. To validate its diagnosis performance, kernel matrix construction based SVM (KMCSVM) classifier is compared with three SVM classifiers i.e. classification tree kernel based SVM (CTKSVM), linear kernel based SVM (L-SVM) and radial basis function based SVM (RBFSVM), to identify different locations and severities of bearing fault. The experimental results indicate that KMCSVM has better classification capability than other methods.