A Novel Deep Model with Meta-Learning for Rolling Bearing Few-Shot Fault Diagnosis

Machine learning,especially deep learning,has been highly successful in data-intensive applications;however,the performance of these models will drop significantly when the amount of the training data amount does not meet the requirement.This leads to the so-called few-shot learning(FSL)problem,which requires the model rapidly generalize to new tasks that containing only a few labeled samples.In this paper,we proposed a new deep model,called deep convolutional meta-learning networks,to address the low performance of generalization under limited data for bearing fault diagnosis.The essential of our approach is to learn a base model from the multiple learning tasks using a support dataset and finetune the learnt parameters using few-shot tasks before it can adapt to the new learning task based on limited training data.The proposed method was compared to several FSL methods,including methods with and without pre-training the embedding mapping,and methods with finetuning the classifier or the whole model by utilizing the few-shot data from the target domain.The comparisons are carried out on 1-shot and 10-shot tasks using the Case Western Reserve University bearing dataset and a cylindrical roller bearing dataset.The experimental result illustrates that our method has good performance on the bearing fault diagnosis across various few-shot conditions.In addition,we found that the pretraining process does not always improve the prediction accuracy.