A reinforcement ensemble deep transfer learning network for rolling bearing fault diagnosis with Multi-source domains

Fault diagnosis with transfer learning has achieved great attention. However, existing methods mostly focused on single-source-single-target sceneries. In some cases, there may exist multiple source domains. Therefore, a reinforcement ensemble deep transfer learning network (REDTLN) is proposed for fault diagnosis with multisource domains. Firstly, various new kernel maximum mean discrepancies (kMMDs) are used to construct multiple deep transfer learning networks (DTLNs) for single-source-single-target domain adaptation. The differences of kernel functions and source domains can help the DTLNs learn diverse transferable features. Secondly, a new unified metric is designed based on kMMD and diversity measures for unsupervised ensemble learning. Finally, using the unified metric as the reward, a reinforcement learning method is firstly explored to generate an effective combination rule for multi-domain-multi-model reinforcement ensemble. The proposed method is verified with experiment datasets, and the results empirically show its effectiveness and superiority compared with other methods.