Gaussian Process Kernel Transfer Enabled Method for Electric Machines Intelligent Faults Detection With Limited Samples

Traditional Artificial Intelligence (AI) based fault detection approaches need a large amount of data for the model learning. However, in a real-world system, it is very difficult and expensive to obtain massive labeled fault data. In addition, the working conditions of a motor are usually variable, conventional fault diagnosis models with weak generalization ability can only he used for fault detection under constant working condition. The performance of traditional AI based approaches decreases when the working condition changes. To this end, a novel deep Gaussian process (CP) kernel transfer based few-shot learning method (RNGPT) is proposed in this paper for the fault detection of electric machines. First, a deep residual network (ResNet) is used to extract the features of the raw data. Then, the encoded latent feature vector is fed into the GP with kernel transfer ability to make the motor fault detection and classification. The proposed method uses much less data than the traditional AI based method to achieve fault diagnosis under variable working condition, and does not cause an overfitting problem. Experimental results of two case studies demonstrate that the proposed RNGPT model can accurately and effectively detect motor faults with limited labeled data under different working conditions. Experimental results of RNGPT with radial basis function (RBF) kernel model on simulation data present that the fault detection accuracy of the proposed method is about 16% higher than the conventional deep learning methods, 6% higher than other few-shot learning based methods in 5-shot and 4% higher in 1-shot. Finally, experimental on a real-world dataset, the RNGPT-RBF model still has the highest fault diagnosis accuracy in 5-shot (99.39 +/- 0.09% ) and 1-shot (98.55 +/- 0.16%).

Automated summary

Traditional AI-based fault detection methods require extensive labeled data which is difficult to obtain. A novel few-shot learning method based on deep Gaussian process kernel transfer is proposed for accurate fault detection in electric machines under variable working conditions, outperforming conventional and other few-shot learning methods.