A Two-Stage Transfer Regression Convolutional Neural Network for Bearing Remaining Useful Life Prediction

Abstract

Recently, deep learning techniques have been successfully used for bearing remaining useful life (RUL) prediction. However, the degradation pattern of bearings can be much different from each other, which leads to the trained model usually not being able to work well for RUL prediction of a new bearing. As a method that can adapt a model trained on source datasets to a different but relative unlabeled target dataset, transfer learning shows the potential to solve this problem. Therefore, we propose a two-stage transfer regression (TR)-based bearing RUL prediction method. Firstly, the incipient fault point (IFP) is detected by a convolutional neural network (CNN) classifier to identity the start time of degradation stage and label the training samples. Then, a transfer regression CNN with multiloss is constructed for RUL prediction, including regression loss, classification loss, maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) and regularization loss, which can not only extract fault information from fault classification loss for RUL prediction, but also minimize the probability distribution distance, thus helping the method to be trained in a domain-invariant way via the transfer regression algorithm. Finally, real data collected from run-to-failure bearing experiments are analyzed by the TR-based CNN method. The results and comparisons with state-of-the-art methods demonstrate the superiority and reliable performance of the proposed method for bearing RUL prediction.