Category knowledge-guided few-shot bearing fault diagnosis

Real-time bearing fault diagnosis plays a vital role in maintaining the safety and reliability of sophisticated industrial systems. However, the scarcity of labeled data in fault diagnosis, due to the difficulty of collecting fault samples and the high cost of labeling, poses a significant challenge in learning discriminative fault features from limited and complex monitoring signals. Few-shot learning (FSL) emerges as a potent method for extracting and accurately classifying features from severe fault signals. Nonetheless, challenges such as data scarcity and environmental noise significantly impede the efficacy of existing FSL methods in diagnosing incipient faults effectively. These limitations are primarily due to the inadequate consideration of inter-class correlations within noisy contexts by current FSL strategies, which restricts their ability to extrapolate familiar features to new classes. Consequently, there is a pressing demand for an FSL approach that can exploit inter-class correlations to address the hurdles of data insufficiency and environmental complexities, thereby facilitating the diagnosis of incipient faults in few-shot settings. This paper proposes a novel category-knowledge-guided model tailored for few-shot multi-task scenarios. By leveraging attribute data from base categories and the similarities across new class samples, our model efficiently establishes mapping relations for unencountered tasks, significantly enhancing its generalization capabilities for early-stage fault diagnosis and multi-task applications. This model ensures swift and precise FSL fault diagnosis under uncharted operational conditions. Comparative analyses utilizing the Case Western Reserve University bearing dataset and the Early Mild Fault Traction Motor bearing dataset demonstrate our model’s superior performance against leading FSL and transfer learning approaches.