Motor Fault Detection and Feature Extraction Using RNN-Based Variational Autoencoder

In most of the fault detection methods, the time domain signals collected from the mechanical equipment usually need to be transformed into frequency domain or other high-level data, highly relying on professional knowledge such as signal processing and fault pattern recognition. Contrary to those existing approaches, we proposed a two-stage machine learning analysis architecture which can accurately predict the motor fault modes only by using motor vibration time-domain signals without any complicated preprocessing. In the first stage, the method RNN-based VAE was proposed which is highly suitable for dimension reduction of time series data. In addition to reducing the dimension of sequential data from 150*3 to 25 dimensions, our method furthermore improves the prediction accuracy evaluated by several classification algorithms. While other dimension reduction methods such as Autoencoder and Variational Autoencoder cannot improve the classification accuracy effectively or even decreased. It indicates that the sequential data after dimension reduction via the RNN-based VAE still can maintain the high-dimensional data information. Furthermore, the experimental results demonstrate that it can be well applied to time series data dimension reduction and shows a significant improvement of the prediction performance, even with a simple double-layer Neural Network can reach over 99% of accuracy. In the second stage, Principal Components Analysis (PCA) and Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) are used to further perform the second dimension reduction, such that the different or unknown fault modes can be clearly visualized and detected.