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fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/TIE.2018.2866050, IEEE
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Multi-wavelet Coefficients Fusion in Deep
Residual Networks for Fault Diagnosis
Minghang Zhao, Myeongsu Kang, Member, IEEE, Baoping Tang, and Michael Pecht, Fellow
Member, IEEE
Abstract—Wavelet transform, an effective tool to
decompose signals into a series of frequency bands, has
been widely used for vibration-based fault diagnosis in
machinery. Likewise, the use of deep learning algorithms is
becoming popular to automatically learn discriminative
features from input data for the sake of improving
diagnostic performance. However, the fact that no general
consensus has been reached as to which wavelet basis
functions are useful for diagnosis motivated this
investigation of methods to fuse multi-wavelet transforms
into deep learning algorithms. In this paper, two
methods—i.e., multi-wavelet coefficients fusion in deep
residual networks by concatenation (MWCF-DRN-C) and
multi-wavelet coefficients fusion in deep residual networks
by maximization (MWCF-DRN-M)—were developed to
capture discriminative information from diverse sets of
wavelet coefficients for fault diagnosis. The efficacy of the
developed methods was verified by applying them to
planetary gearbox fault diagnosis.
Index Terms—Deep residual networks, fault diagnosis,
feature learning, multi-wavelet coefficients fusion,
planetary gearbox.
I. INTRODUCTION
P LANETARY gearboxes can provide higher gear ratios and
power densities than the general fixed-shaft gearboxes, and
have been used in a wide range of critical mechanical systems,
such as helicopters, heavy trucks, and wind turbines [1].
However, due to longtime dust corrosion, heavy loads, and
tough operating environment, planetary gearboxes may suffer
various kinds of faults, such as damages to the bearings, gear
root cracking, and shaft imbalance [2]. Consequently, effective
fault diagnosis and timely maintenance of planetary gearboxes
are helpful to ensure the safety of helicopters and heavy trucks,
Manuscript received September 18, 2017; revised February 5, 2018
and June 14, 2018; accepted August 5, 2018. This work was supported
in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant
51775065 and in part by the Technology Innovation Program (or
Industrial Strategic Technology Development Program (10076392,
Development of Vehicle Self Diagnosis System and Service for
Automobile Driving Safety Improvement) funded by the Ministry of Trade,
Industry and Energy, Korea). (Corresponding author: Myeongsu Kang.)
Minghang Zhao and Baoping Tang are with State Key Laboratory of
Mechanical Transmission, Chongqing University, Chongqing 400044,
China (e-mail: minghang.zhao@gmail.com, bptang@cqu.edu.cn).
Myeongsu Kang and Michael Pecht are with the Center for Advanced
Life Cycle Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742,
USA (e-mail: mskang@calce.umd.edu, pecht@calce.umd.edu).
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long-term generation of wind power, and the reliable operation
of other related mechanical systems.
However, fault diagnosis of planetary gearboxes is often
more challenging than fixed-shaft gearboxes, because the
dynamic characteristics of planetary gearboxes are much more
complicated. To be specific, the planet gears not only mesh
with the sun gear, but also mesh with the ring gear
simultaneously; the planetary gearboxes mostly have to operate
together with other rotating components, such as fixed-shaft
gearboxes and motors; and there may be irregular noises from
the working environments, which make the vibration signals
more complex. Furthermore, the operating conditions mostly
change with time, so that even the vibration signals of the same
health condition may also vary a lot. As a result, it is very
difficult for the general signal processing (or envelope analysis)
based fault detection methods to detect the defect frequency,
and then diagnose the faults of planetary gearboxes accurately.
The state-of-the-art machine learning-based fault diagnosis
methods can be classified into two categories: shallow learning
vs. deep learning. In the shallow learning-based methods,
feature construction based on statistical features (e.g.,
root-mean-square (RMS), kurtosis, and energy [3], [4]) is an
essential step. Then, the features are fed into shallow learning
algorithms, such as support vector machines, neural networks,
and decision trees, for the sake of fault diagnosis. The use of
shallow learning algorithms with domain knowledge-based
statistical features can be computationally more efficient than
deep learning-based approaches. Likewise, monitoring the
features can offer relatively direct health information about a
target system, while learned features derived from deep
learning algorithms may not. However, it is difficult and
time-consuming to determine which features should be
extracted, because an optimized set of features varies from case
to case in industrial applications. Further, the fact that
conventional shallow learning algorithms are not scalable for
dealing with high-volume and high-dimensional data for fault
diagnosis will be an issue.
Deep learning algorithms [5] that automatically learn a good
set of features from the monitoring data for diagnosis can be an
effective way to address the above-mentioned disadvantages
[6]-[15]. For example, Jia et al. [6] used deep auto-encoders to
pre-train the deep neural networks, which achieved higher
accuracies than shallow neural networks; Wang et al. [13]
applied convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to the
time-frequency representations obtained by using continuous
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wavelet transform, which yielded higher accuracies than
traditional shallow classifiers. Therefore, the feature learning
ability of deep learning algorithms is a great benefit for fault
diagnosis applications. However, training deep learning
algorithms is often not an easy task. For example, traditional
deep auto-encoders involve too many weights to be trained, and
although convolutional neural networks (CNNs) adopt a weight
sharing strategy to reduce the number of weights,
back-propagating errors through multiple layers can result in
exploding/vanishing gradient problems, which can be a
primary cause of training failures. Additionally, most of the
previous deep learning algorithms were not specifically
designed for vibration-based fault diagnosis. Hence, to further
improve diagnostic performance, it is necessary to explore new
deep learning architectures.
Time-frequency analysis can uncover the dynamic properties
of non-stationary vibration signals. Various time-frequency
analysis methods (e.g., short-time Fourier transform, wavelet
transform, and empirical mode decomposition) have been used
in vibration-based fault diagnosis. However, short-time Fourier
transform only has a fixed resolution in the frequency domain,
and empirical mode decomposition lacks a theoretical
demonstration. Due to the merit of multi-resolution localization
in detecting faults from gearboxes [16], wavelet transform [17]
was used in this study to generate time-frequency
representations of vibration signal as the input of the deep
learning method. To be specific, discrete wavelet packet
transform (DWPT) was adopted, which can generate a series of
matrices of wavelet packet coefficients.
However, there is still no general consensus as to which
wavelet can offer optimal performance for fault diagnosis.
Furthermore, an optimal wavelet basis function can be varied
depending on fault detection and diagnosis applications [12],
[13], [18]-[20]. For example, Ding and He [12] employed a
deep learning model for fault diagnosis of spindle bearings,
which took a matrix containing wavelet packet energies as
input. Specifically, the authors used a Daubechies 8 wavelet for
DWPT. Wang et al. [13] used a Morlet wavelet to generate
time-frequency representations from the vibration signals and
further applied a CNN to fault diagnosis, which took the
time-frequency representations as input. Kang et al. [18] used
DWPT with a Daubechies 20 wavelet to decompose acoustic
emission signals into a series of wavelet packet nodes and
extract features from the nodes, such as relative wavelet packet
node energies, for bearing fault diagnosis.
To address the aforementioned issue, wavelet selection [21],
[22] and multi-wavelet coefficients fusion are two promising
solutions. Here, the main objective of wavelet selection is to
find an optimal wavelet for fault diagnosis. For example,
Vakharia et al. [21] used a criterion named as “maximum
energy to Shannon entropy ratio” to specify an optimal wavelet
for feature extraction. However, there is still a likelihood that
an optimal wavelet specified by wavelet selection methods may
not be effective for time-frequency representations for learning
a discriminative set of features that will be used for planetary
gearbox fault diagnosis under non-stationary operating
conditions. This motivated us to learn a good set of features
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from time-frequency representations obtained by diverse
wavelets and verify the effectiveness of the method to fuse
multiple wavelet transforms into deep learning algorithms.
That is, this paper aims to learn a good set of features from
diverse wavelets. Furthermore, learning diverse features is vital
for increasing the performance of deep learning methods [23],
and the fusion of multi-wavelet coefficients into deep learning
algorithms can enable learning diverse features. Therefore, this
study can avoid the wavelet selection problem.
A deep residual network (DRN) [24],[25] is a state-of-the-art
deep learning method. DRNs can automatically learn
discriminative features from the input data. The difference
between a DRN and the classical CNN is that the DRN uses
identity skip-connections (ISCs) in the deep architecture to
make the trainable parameters easier to be optimized. The DRN
integrates many “tricks” for a better training of deep neural
networks, such as momentum, batch normalization (BN), L2
regularization, and variance-scaling weight initialization.
These tricks make it reliable and applicable to the experimental
data with different properties. Therefore, the DRN has the
potential to learn a good set of features from the input data and
to correctly identify the health status of an object machine.
In this study, two multi-wavelet coefficients fusion methods
within the DRN architecture were developed for fault
diagnosis—multi-wavelet coefficients fusion in a DRN by
concatenation (MWCF-DRN-C) and multi-wavelet coefficients
fusion in a DRN by maximization (MWCF-DRN-M),
respectively. The MWCF-DRN-C method concatenates a series
of matrices of wavelet packet coefficients and takes a single
concatenated matrix as an input, whereas the MWCF-DRN-M
method re-designs the architecture of the DRN for the sake of
multi-wavelet coefficients fusion. These methods can
adaptively adjust the contribution of wavelet packet
coefficients to fault diagnosis, with the goal of improving
diagnostic performance. Likewise, these methods can learn
better features for fault diagnosis than the state-of-the-art deep
learning methods (i.e., CNN and DRN) taking a matrix of
wavelet packet coefficients obtained from a certain wavelet
basis function.
The reminder of this paper is organized as follows. Section II
describes a simulation system to collect vibration signals under
variable operating conditions used for planetary gearbox fault
diagnosis. Section III delineates the inclusion of domain
knowledge into the deep models—that is, MWCF-DRN-C and
MWCF-DRN-M—and defines the input of the methods using
multi-wavelet coefficients fusion. In Section IV, performance
comparisons are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the
developed methods for fault diagnosis, and the limitations are
discussed. Section V gives conclusions.
II. FAULT DESCRIPTION OF PLANETARY GEARBOXES
To verify the effectiveness of the developed methods, fault
diagnosis of a planetary gearbox was considered. A drivetrain
dynamics simulator was used to simulate the faults. The
simulator was mainly composed of a 3-phase 3 HP motor, a
2-stage planetary gearbox with 192:7 gear ratio (including 4
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planet gears in the 1st stage and 3 planet gears in the 2nd stage), a
2-stage parallel gearbox (with 29:100 gear ratio in the 1st stage
and 5:2 gear ratio in the 2nd stage), and a programmable heavy
duty magnetic brake (with a maximum torque of 65 lb•ft), as
shown in Fig. 1. More information about the simulator can be
found in [26]. Vibration signals in the vertical direction were
collected at 25.6 kHz using an accelerometer, which was
mounted at the input side of the planetary gearbox.
Fig. 1. The drivetrain dynamics simulator used in this study.
This study considered nine health conditions of a planetary
gearbox under non-stationary operating conditions, including 1
normal and 8 faulty statuses (i.e., bearing and gear defects), as
summarized in Table I. For each health condition, 12 16-s
vibration signals were collected as the rotational speed of the
motor linearly increased from 20 Hz to 36 Hz under three
different torsional loads, as described in Table II. In particular,
each 16-s vibration signal was equally divided into 100
observations with each observation in the length of 4,096
samples. Therefore, the total number of observations was 1200
for each health condition, as presented in Table II. Likewise,
although each of the 0.16-s vibration signals already contained
a certain level of noise, white Gaussian noise was artificially
embedded into them to increase the level of difficulty in fault
diagnosis. This is based on the assumption that the vibration
signals can contain a higher level of noise in real-world
vibration-based fault diagnosis applications; noise was added to
the signals to enforce a signal-to-noise ratio of 5 dB. The
average RMSs are shown in Table I to illustrate the intensities
of the faults under non-stationary operating conditions.
TABLE I
A SUMMARY OF HEALTH STATES OF THE PLANETARY GEARBOX
Health status Label Description
Healthy H Healthy bearings and gears
BFB A ball fault in a bearing
IFB An inner race fault in a bearing
OFB An outer race fault in a bearing
CFB A composite fault of BFB, IFB, and OFB
Faulty
TRC A tooth root crack on a gear
TSP A tooth surface pitting on a gear
TCF A tooth chipped fault on a gear
TMF A tooth missing fault on a gear
TABLE II
NUMBER OF OBSERVATIONS FOR EACH HEALTH STATUS
Load
Number of 16-s vibration
Number of observations in
signals under each load
(lb·ft)
condition
each 16-s vibration signal
1 4 100
6 4 100
18 4 100
III. DEVELOPED METHODS FOR MULTI-WAVELET
COEFFICIENTS FUSION IN A DRN
As stated in Section I, as a candidate solution to address the
fact that no general consensus has been reached as to which
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wavelet function provides optimal diagnostic performance,
multi-wavelet coefficients fusion is considered in this study.
Accordingly, this section mainly discusses the essential idea
behind the two developed methods, MWCF-DRN-C and
MWCF-DRN-M, by presenting the theoretical background of a
DRN and the design of DRN architecture.
A. Input Data Configuration
As a classical multi-resolution analysis algorithm, DWPT
[17] enables a signal to be decomposed into two sets of wavelet
coefficients, i.e., the approximation coefficients at a
low-frequency band and the detail coefficients at a relatively
high-frequency band. As indicated in Fig. 2, the decomposition
is then repeated recursively not only on the approximation
coefficients but also on the detail coefficients, so that the
information on various frequency bands can be revealed.
Fig. 2. An example of a 3-level decomposition tree of DWPT, where 𝑊𝑊𝑖𝑖,𝑗𝑗
is the wavelet coefficients in the 𝑗𝑗th sub-band at the 𝑖𝑖th decomposition
level. 𝑊𝑊1,0 and 𝑊𝑊1,1 are the approximation coefficients and detail
coefficients of the original signal, respectively. 𝑊𝑊2,0 and 𝑊𝑊2,1 are the
approximation coefficients and detail coefficients of 𝑊𝑊1,0, respectively.
Mathematically, DWPT can be implemented using a series
of convolutions with a pair of low-pass and high-pass filters
[17]. Specifically, the high-pass filter ℎ(∙) and the low-pass
filter 𝑔𝑔(∙) such that 𝑔𝑔(𝑘𝑘) = (−1)𝑘𝑘 ℎ(1 − 𝑘𝑘) can be defined by:
1
ℎ(𝑘𝑘) = < 𝜑𝜑(𝑡𝑡), 𝜑𝜑(2𝑡𝑡 − 𝑘𝑘) > (1)
√2
1
𝑔𝑔(𝑘𝑘) = < 𝜓𝜓(𝑡𝑡), 𝜓𝜓(2𝑡𝑡 − 𝑘𝑘) > (2)
√2
where 𝜑𝜑(∙) is a scaling function, 𝜓𝜓(∙) is the corresponding
wavelet function, <∙,∙> is an inner product, and 𝑡𝑡 and 𝑘𝑘 are
variables. For a discrete 1-dimensional signal, its wavelet
coefficients at various frequency sub-bands and decomposition
levels can be calculated iteratively by:
RMS (m/s2)
1.00 ± 0.26 𝑊𝑊𝑖𝑖+1,2𝑗𝑗 (𝜏𝜏) = � ℎ(𝑘𝑘 − 2𝜏𝜏)𝑊𝑊𝑖𝑖,𝑗𝑗 (𝑘𝑘) (3)
1.54 ± 0.66
1.70 ± 0.82 𝑘𝑘
1.86 ± 0.88
1.77 ± 0.86 𝑊𝑊𝑖𝑖+1,2𝑗𝑗+1 (𝜏𝜏) = � 𝑔𝑔(𝑘𝑘 − 2𝜏𝜏)𝑊𝑊𝑖𝑖,𝑗𝑗 (𝑘𝑘) (4)
1.60 ± 0.66
𝑘𝑘
1.64 ± 0.68
1.01 ± 0.25 where 𝑊𝑊0,0 is the original discrete signal in the length of 𝑁𝑁,
1.61 ± 0.70
{𝑊𝑊𝑖𝑖,𝑗𝑗 (𝑘𝑘), 𝑘𝑘 = 1,2, … , 𝑁𝑁/2𝑖𝑖 } are the wavelet coefficients in the
𝑗𝑗th sub-band at the 𝑖𝑖th decomposition level, {𝑊𝑊𝑖𝑖+1,2𝑗𝑗 (𝜏𝜏), 𝜏𝜏 =
Total number of 1,2, … , 𝑁𝑁/2𝑖𝑖+1 } and {𝑊𝑊𝑖𝑖+1,2𝑗𝑗+1 (𝜏𝜏), 𝜏𝜏 = 1,2, … , 𝑁𝑁/2𝑖𝑖+1 } are
observations for each
class the wavelet coefficients in the (2𝑗𝑗)th and (2𝑗𝑗 + 1)th sub-bands
1200
at the (𝑖𝑖 + 1)th decomposition level, respectively, and 𝑗𝑗 ranges
from 0 to 2𝑖𝑖 − 1 at the 𝑖𝑖th decomposition level.
As mentioned in Section I, previous research has found that
the performance of the DWPT-assisted fault diagnosis
applications was highly dependent on the selected wavelet
functions [16]. Aiming at this problem, a straightforward
solution is to use multiple wavelet functions together for
comprehensive time-frequency representations of vibration
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signals. In this study, Daubechies wavelets were used as an
example in the experiment since they were widely used in
vibration-based fault diagnosis [3], [12], [19]. However, it is
notable that the developed methods are applicable to other
wavelets, such as Symlet, Coiflet, Morlet, and so forth.
As depicted in Fig. 3, the wavelet packet coefficients at
different frequency bands obtained using a certain wavelet can
be formed into a 2-dimensional (2D) matrix; then, the 2D
matrices derived from different wavelets can be stacked
together as a 3-dimensional (3D) matrix. Likewise, since the
depth of DWPT was 6 (i.e., depth = 6) and the length of an
observation was 4,096 in the experiment, the dimension of a 3D
matrix of wavelet packet coefficients in this study was 𝑝𝑝 × 𝑞𝑞 ×
𝑁𝑁w = (4096/2depth ) × (2depth ) × 𝑁𝑁w = 64 × 64 × 𝑁𝑁w ,
where 𝑁𝑁w is the number of selected wavelets.
Fig. 3. A series of 2D matrices of wavelet packet coefficients obtained
where 𝐼𝐼C is the input feature map of a convolutional layer; 𝐾𝐾 is
a convolutional kernel; 𝑏𝑏 is a bias; 𝑂𝑂C is a channel of the output
feature map; 𝑖𝑖, 𝑗𝑗, and 𝑐𝑐 are the indexes of row, column, and
channel of the feature map, respectively; and 𝑢𝑢 and 𝑣𝑣 are the
indexes of row and column of the convolutional kernel,
respectively. Since a convolutional layer can have more than
one convolutional kernels, more than one channel of output
feature map can be obtained. In this study, convolutional
kernels at a 3 × 3 size were used because they not only have a
higher computational efficiency than larger kernels, but they
can also be large enough to detect local maxima [27].
In each training iteration, a mini-batch of observations is
randomly selected and fed into the DRN. However, the
distributions of learned features in the mini-batches often
continuously change in the training iterations, which is known
as the internal covariance shift problem [28]. In such a case, the
weights and biases have to be continuously updated to adapt to
the changed distributions. As a result, the training of deep
networks can be challenging. BN [28] is a kind of technique
which is used to address this problem and is expressed by:
1 𝑁𝑁batch
𝜇𝜇 = � 𝑥𝑥𝑠𝑠 (6)
𝑁𝑁batch 𝑠𝑠=1
1 𝑁𝑁batch
𝜎𝜎 2 = � (𝑥𝑥𝑠𝑠 − 𝜇𝜇)2 (7)
𝑁𝑁batch 𝑠𝑠=1
𝑥𝑥𝑠𝑠 − 𝜇𝜇
𝑥𝑥�𝑠𝑠 = (8)
√𝜎𝜎 2 + 𝜖𝜖
𝑦𝑦𝑠𝑠 = 𝛾𝛾𝑥𝑥�𝑠𝑠 + 𝛽𝛽 (9)
where 𝑥𝑥𝑠𝑠 is a feature of the 𝑠𝑠 observation in a mini-batch,
th

using various Daubechies wavelets. 𝑁𝑁batch is the mini-batch size, 𝜖𝜖 is a constant value which is
B. Background Theory of a DRN close to zero, and 𝑦𝑦𝑠𝑠 is the output feature of BN. The input
features are normalized to have a mean of 0 and a standard
A DRN can be interpreted as a model that is a stack of deviation of 1 in (6), (7), and (8), so that the input features are
various components, including a convolutional layer, a series of enforced to have similar distributions; then, 𝛾𝛾 and 𝛽𝛽 are trained
residual building units (RBUs), a BN, a rectifier linear unit to scale and shift the normalized features to desirable
activation function (ReLU), a global average pooling (GAP), distributions. The optimization of 𝛾𝛾 and 𝛽𝛽 is achieved using a
and a fully connected output layer [24], [25]. As shown in Fig. gradient descent algorithm, which is expressed by:
4(a), a RBU can be composed of two BNs, two ReLUs, two 𝜂𝜂 𝜕𝜕𝐸𝐸𝑠𝑠 𝜕𝜕𝑃𝑃𝑃𝑃𝑃𝑃ℎ_𝑟𝑟𝑘𝑘
convolutional layers, and one ISC. A brief architecture of a 𝛾𝛾 ← 𝛾𝛾 − �� (10)
𝑁𝑁batch 𝜕𝜕𝑃𝑃𝑃𝑃𝑃𝑃ℎ_𝑟𝑟𝑘𝑘 𝜕𝜕𝜕𝜕
DRN is shown in Fig. 4(b). 𝑠𝑠 𝑘𝑘
𝜂𝜂 𝜕𝜕𝐸𝐸𝑠𝑠 𝜕𝜕𝑃𝑃𝑃𝑃𝑃𝑃ℎ_𝑏𝑏𝑘𝑘
𝛽𝛽 ← 𝛽𝛽 − �� (11)
𝑁𝑁batch 𝜕𝜕𝑃𝑃𝑃𝑃𝑃𝑃ℎ_𝑏𝑏𝑘𝑘 𝜕𝜕𝜕𝜕
𝑠𝑠 𝑘𝑘
where 𝜂𝜂 is the learning rate, 𝐸𝐸𝑠𝑠 is the error of the 𝑠𝑠 th
observation. 𝑃𝑃𝑃𝑃𝑃𝑃ℎ_𝑟𝑟 and 𝑃𝑃𝑃𝑃𝑃𝑃ℎ_𝑏𝑏 are two collections of
differentiable paths that connect 𝛾𝛾 and 𝛽𝛽 with the error at the
output layer, respectively.
The ReLU is used to achieve nonlinear transformations by
enforcing the negative features to be zero. It is expressed by:
𝑂𝑂R (𝑖𝑖, 𝑗𝑗, 𝑐𝑐) = max{𝐼𝐼R (𝑖𝑖, 𝑗𝑗, 𝑐𝑐), 0} (12)
where 𝐼𝐼R and 𝑂𝑂R are the input and output feature maps of the
Fig. 4. (a) A RBU, (b) a brief architecture of a DRN, in which “Conv 3 × 3”
ReLU, respectively. The derivative of ReLU is expressed by:
refers to a convolutional layer with convolutional kernel size of 3 × 3.
The convolutional layer is used to learn features, in which 𝜕𝜕𝑂𝑂R (𝑖𝑖, 𝑗𝑗, 𝑐𝑐) 1, if 𝐼𝐼R (𝑖𝑖, 𝑗𝑗, 𝑐𝑐) > 0
=� (13)
each convolutional kernel behaves as a trainable feature 𝜕𝜕𝐼𝐼R (𝑖𝑖, 𝑗𝑗, 𝑐𝑐) 0, if 𝐼𝐼R (𝑖𝑖, 𝑗𝑗, 𝑐𝑐) < 0
extractor. Compared with matrix multiplications in the Its derivative is either 1 or 0, which can reduce the risk of
traditional fully connected layers, the use of convolutions in gradient vanishing and exploding compared with the sigmoid
convolutional layers enables reduction of the number of and tanh activation functions.
weights and computational complexity, which is expressed by: The ISCs are the key component that makes a DRN easier to
train than the traditional CNNs. In the training process of
𝑂𝑂C (𝑖𝑖, 𝑗𝑗) = � � � 𝐼𝐼C (𝑖𝑖 − 𝑢𝑢, 𝑗𝑗 − 𝑣𝑣, 𝑐𝑐) ∙ 𝐾𝐾(𝑢𝑢, 𝑣𝑣, 𝑐𝑐) + 𝑏𝑏 (5)
traditional CNNs without ISCs, the gradients of error with
𝑢𝑢 𝑣𝑣 𝑐𝑐

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respect to the weights (and biases) need to be back-propagated
layer by layer. For example, the gradients on the 𝑙𝑙 th layer are
dependent on the weights at the (𝑙𝑙 + 1)th layer. If the weights at
the (𝑙𝑙 + 1)th layer are not optimal, the gradients on the 𝑙𝑙 th layer
cannot be optimal as well. As a result, it is difficult to
effectively train the weights in a CNN with multiple layers.
ISCs solve this problem by directly connecting some
convolutional layers to deeper layers, so that it can be easy for
the gradients to be back-propagated through a deep network. In
other words, the gradients can be back-propagated into the
layers easier than the traditional CNNs, so that the weights and
biases can be updated effectively. It has been shown that a DRN
with tens or hundreds of layers can be easily trained and yield
higher accuracies than the CNNs without ISCs [25].
A GAP was applied before the final fully connected output
layer, which is expressed by:
𝑂𝑂G (𝑐𝑐) = average 𝐼𝐼G (𝑖𝑖, 𝑗𝑗, 𝑐𝑐) (14)
𝑖𝑖,𝑗𝑗
where 𝐼𝐼G and 𝑂𝑂G are the input and output feature maps of GAP,
respectively. The GAP enables the shift variant problem to be
addressed by calculating a global feature from each channel of
the input feature map. In this study, the shift variant problem
means that the fault-related impulses can exist in different
locations in the observations, and the GAP can ensure that the
DRN learns features which are invariant to the locations. The
output feature maps of the GAP are fed to the fully connected
output layer to pick up the classification results.
The training process of a DRN follows the same principle as
the general neural networks. The training data are propagated
into a DRN and processed while passing through a series of
convolutional layers, BNs, and ReLUs followed by a GAP and
a fully connected output layer. More specifically, at the fully
connected output layer, a softmax function is used to estimate
the possibility of an observation belonging to the classes [29],
which is expressed by:
𝑒𝑒 𝑥𝑥𝑛𝑛
𝑦𝑦𝑛𝑛 = 𝑁𝑁class , for 𝑛𝑛 = 1, … , 𝑁𝑁class (15)
∑𝑧𝑧=1 𝑒𝑒 𝑥𝑥𝑧𝑧
where 𝑥𝑥𝑛𝑛 is the feature at the 𝑛𝑛th neuron of the output layer, 𝑦𝑦𝑛𝑛
is the output, which can be seen as the estimated possibility of
an observation belonging to the 𝑛𝑛th class, and 𝑁𝑁class is the total
number of classes. Then, the cross-entropy error, which
measures the distance between the true label 𝑡𝑡 and the output 𝑦𝑦,
can be calculated by:
𝑁𝑁class
𝐸𝐸(𝑦𝑦, 𝑡𝑡) = − � 𝑡𝑡𝑛𝑛 ln(𝑦𝑦𝑛𝑛 )
𝑛𝑛=1
where 𝑡𝑡𝑛𝑛 is the true possibility of the observation belonging to
the 𝑛𝑛th class. Note that the partial derivative of cross-entropy
error with respect to the neurons at the fully connected output
layer can be expressed by:
𝜕𝜕𝜕𝜕
= 𝑦𝑦𝑛𝑛 − 𝑡𝑡𝑛𝑛
𝜕𝜕𝑥𝑥𝑛𝑛
Then, the error is back-propagated through the network to
update the weights and biases, which are expressed by:
𝜂𝜂 𝜕𝜕𝐸𝐸𝑠𝑠 𝜕𝜕𝑥𝑥𝑛𝑛 𝜕𝜕𝑁𝑁𝑁𝑁𝑁𝑁_𝑤𝑤𝑛𝑛,𝑘𝑘
𝑤𝑤 ← 𝑤𝑤 − ���
𝑁𝑁batch 𝜕𝜕𝑥𝑥𝑛𝑛 𝜕𝜕𝑁𝑁𝑁𝑁𝑁𝑁_𝑤𝑤𝑛𝑛,𝑘𝑘 𝜕𝜕𝜕𝜕
𝑠𝑠 𝑛𝑛 𝑘𝑘
𝜂𝜂 𝜕𝜕𝐸𝐸𝑠𝑠 𝜕𝜕𝑥𝑥𝑛𝑛 𝜕𝜕𝑁𝑁𝑁𝑁𝑁𝑁_𝑏𝑏𝑛𝑛,𝑘𝑘
𝑏𝑏 ← 𝑏𝑏 − ���
𝑁𝑁batch 𝜕𝜕𝑥𝑥𝑛𝑛 𝜕𝜕𝑁𝑁𝑁𝑁𝑁𝑁_𝑏𝑏𝑛𝑛,𝑘𝑘 𝜕𝜕𝜕𝜕
𝑠𝑠 𝑛𝑛 𝑘𝑘
where 𝑤𝑤 is a weight, 𝑏𝑏 is a bias, and 𝑁𝑁𝑁𝑁𝑁𝑁_𝑤𝑤 and 𝑁𝑁𝑁𝑁𝑁𝑁_𝑏𝑏 are two
collections of differentiable paths that connect the weight and
bias with the neurons at the fully connected output layer,
respectively. The training procedures can be repeated a certain
number of times so that the parameters can be optimized. In
summary, the parameters that need to be optimized while
training include 𝛾𝛾 and 𝛽𝛽 in BNs and the weights and biases in
the convolutional layers and the fully connected output layer.
C. Design of the Fundamental Architecture for DRNs
Deep learning models’ architectures, including depth (i.e.,
the number of nonlinear transformation layers) and width (i.e.,
the numbers of kernels in the convolutional layers), are key
factors that influence the models’ performance, such as the test
accuracy and computation time. Zoph and Le [30] employed
reinforcement learning for network architecture search, which
was computationally expensive and used 800 graphics
processing units to train the deep models with different
hyperparameters. Suganuma et al. [31] investigated a method
using genetic programming to design deep networks. Despite
such studies, neural network architecture optimization is a
long-standing issue in the field–that is, there is still no general
consensus as to how deep or wide the network should be.
Fig. 5. A typical architecture of a DRN, in which m indicates the number
of convolutional kernels, and “/2” is meant to move the convolutional
kernels with a stride of 2.
The fundamental architecture of the DRN used in this study
is pictorially illustrated in Fig. 5. Likewise, the essential idea
behind this architecture is described as follows. First, the
architecture has 19 convolutional layers and 1 fully connected
layer in depth. Note that it is important to contain a sufficient
number of nonlinear transformation layers to ensure that the
(16) input data can be converted to be discriminative features. In
previous studies conducted for vibration- and current-based
fault diagnosis using deep learning, no more than 10 nonlinear
transformation layers have been used [6]-[15]. Considering the
increased level of nonlinearity of the acquired data, the DRN
contains more nonlinear transformation layers, where a
(17) nonlinear transformation layer stands for a convolutional layer
with a nonlinear activation function (i.e., ReLU) in this study.
As mentioned above, DRNs with tens or hundreds of layers can
be easily trained due to the use of ISCs [25], so that the depth of
(18) the DRN architecture is in a reasonable range.
Then, the first convolutional layer (i.e., the layer closest to
(19) the input layer) and three convolutional layers in the RBUs,
which have a stride of 2, are used to reduce the size of the
feature maps. In Fig. 5, 𝑚𝑚 indicates the number of

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convolutional kernels, which is increased to 2𝑚𝑚 and 4𝑚𝑚 in
deeper layers because a few basic features can be integrated to
be many different high-level features. 𝑚𝑚 is set to 4 in this study.
To further alleviate over-fitting, dropout [32] with a ratio of
50% is applied to the GAP. In other words, half of the neurons
in the GAP layer were randomly selected and set to be zero in
each training iteration, which can be interpreted as a process of
adding noise to the network, in order to prevent the DRN from
memorizing too much non-discriminative information and
ensure a high generalizability.
D. Multi-wavelet Coefficients Fusion in a DRN
In this subsection, the motivations for developing
multi-wavelet coefficients fusion methods are described, and
the architectures of the two developed methods
(MWCF-DRN-C and MWCF-DRN-M) are presented.
1) Motivations of Multi-wavelet Coefficients Fusion
Fig. 6. (a) Schematic diagram of a rolling element bearing with a crack
on its inner race, in which the arrows denote rotating and moving
directions, (b) an illustration of impulses due to the crack, (c) schematic
diagram of a gear with a broken tooth, and (d) an illustration of the
waveform generated by the faulty gear.
The faults on bearings and/or gears often produce relatively
large amplitudes in the waveform of vibrations signals. For
example, for a bearing with a crack on its inner race (see Fig.
6(a)), there will be a sudden change of contact force every time
a rolling ball passes over the crack, and the sudden change of
contact force will create an impulse in the waveform, as
indicated in Fig. 6(b). For a bearing with a crack on its outer
race, the rolling balls will strike on the crack and lead to
impulses as well. Similarly, a broken tooth on a gear (see Fig.
6(c)) can lead to a large amplitude every time the broken tooth
meshes with the tooth of another gear, as indicated in Fig. 6(d).
Conventional signal processing-based fault diagnosis
methods often rely on the detection of fault-related waveforms.
For example, for a bearing rotating at a constant speed, the
fault-related impulses will be generated periodically; if the time
interval between the impulses matches the ball passing
frequency of the inner race, it is possible to determine whether
the bearing has a fault on its inner race. However, for large
rotating machines with multi-stage gearboxes, the vibration
signals are often composed of multiple components because of
vibrations excited by the meshing of multi-stage gear
transmissions, rotations of shafts and bearings, or
environmental noise. For a rotating machine operating at
varying rotating speeds, frequencies of these vibration
components can be non-stationary. Moreover, when a fault is at
its early stage, the fault-related information in the waveforms is
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not easily detected. As a result, the fault-related information
can be overwhelmed by the other components, which makes the
fault diagnosis a challenging task.
To deal with the non-stationary vibration signals, DWPT is
employed to decompose the vibration signals into multiple
sub-band signals. However, it is generally unknown which
sub-band signal contains the most intrinsic information about
the system’s health conditions (i.e., normal and several faulty
conditions). Likewise, because informative sub-band signals
can be varied due to changes in operating conditions (e.g.,
rotating speeds), this study combines all the wavelet
coefficients at each terminal node and uses them as input for the
deep learning methods.
In general, different wavelets may be optimal for diagnosing
different types of faults under different operating conditions, so
that it is unlikely for a certain wavelet to be the most effective
for diagnosing all types of faults in consideration (e.g., bearing
inner race faults, outer race faults, ball faults, gear surface pits,
and gear root cracks). Therefore, the fusion of multiple
wavelets can improve the performance of a fault diagnosis task
involving the classification of multiple fault types.
2) MWCF-DRN-C
The developed MWCF-DRN-C method is based on a
well-known fact in deep learning–that is, learning diverse
features is critical for increasing performance [23]. The
multi-wavelet coefficients fusion concept can be considered a
promising way to introduce diversity into a DRN. To enable
multi-wavelet coefficients fusion, one of the simplest methods
is to concatenate all 2D matrices of wavelet packet coefficients
and propagate them into the DRN.
As illustrated in Fig. 7(a), a special design in
MWCF-DRN-C is the use of a concatenation layer to combine
multiple wavelet packet coefficients by forming a 𝑝𝑝 × 𝑞𝑞 × 𝑁𝑁𝑤𝑤
matrix, where 𝑁𝑁𝑤𝑤 is the number of wavelets in consideration
and 𝑝𝑝 and 𝑞𝑞 are the dimensionality of a 2D matrix of wavelet
packet coefficients (see Section III.A). Note that the
concatenation layer does not have any parameter to be trained.
Then, with the use of the concatenation layer, the first
convolutional layer has more trainable weights that can be used
for multi-wavelet coefficients fusion. To be specific, each
convolutional kernel in the first convolutional layer of
MWCF-DRN-C has 3 × 3 × 𝑁𝑁w weights, while a
convolutional kernel in the first convolutional layer of the DRN
without multi-wavelet coefficients fusion only has 3 × 3
weights, where 3 × 3 indicates that the length and width of a
convolutional kernel are both 3. This difference is caused by the
nature of convolutional layers, i.e., the number of channels of a
convolutional kernel has to be the same with the number of
channels of input feature map. After a supervised training
process, trainable weights and biases of the MWCF-DRN-C
can be optimized to learn a discriminative set of features for
accurate fault diagnosis.
3) MWCF-DRN-M
The development of MWCF-DRN-M is closely related to the
working principle of wavelet analysis in fault diagnosis. For
fault detection of rotating machinery, wavelet analysis often
works as a method to discover fault-related waveforms by
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generating very positive or negative wavelet packet coefficients.
In other words, compared with the wavelet packet coefficients
which are close to zero, very positive or negative wavelet
packet coefficients are more likely to represent fault-related
waveforms if the wavelet is effective in detecting the
fault-related waveforms. However, for large rotating
machineries with multi-stage gear transmissions, it is often
unavoidable that some unimportant wavelet packet coefficients
can have large absolute values as well, which is mainly caused
by the other vibration components mentioned in section III.D.1.
Aiming at the above issues, an individual convolutional layer
with trainable parameters is applied to each 2D matrix of
wavelet packet coefficients with the goal of highlighting the
fault-related wavelet packet coefficients, i.e., transforming the
important wavelet packet coefficients to be large features. Then,
motivated by the fact that it is generally unknown which
wavelet can be the most effective in detecting the fault-related
waveforms, the developed MWCF-DRN-M method uses a
maximization layer [33]-[35] to fuse the information from
multiple wavelets (i.e., the output features of the individual
convolutional layers). To be specific, the element-wise
maximum values are taken as the output in the maximization
layer.
The architecture of the developed MWCF-DRN-M is
illustrated in Fig. 7(b). The individual convolutional layers
(which are applied to the 2D matrices of wavelet packet
coefficients) and the maximization layer are special designs
that differentiate the MWCF-DRN-M from the original DRN.
The working principle of the special designs is further
explained. Although the maximization layer is parameterless,
the individual convolutional layers can make it to be a trainable
process, which enable to adjust the values of the features before
performing element-wise maximum feature selection. In this
way, the developed MWCF-DRN-M can automatically learn
which features to select for the sake of yielding high diagnostic
accuracy. This alternative method facilitates the inclusion of
physics-based knowledge into the DRN.
IV. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
The two developed methods—i.e., MWCF-DRN-C and
MWCF-DRN-M—were implemented using TensorFlow 1.0.1,
which is a machine learning library open-sourced by Google.
Experimental comparisons were made with the classical CNN
and DRN to verify the efficacy of the developed methods.
A. Hyperparameters Setup
The hyperparameters were set based on the setups in generic
Fig. 7. Architectures of (a) MWCF-DRN-C and (b) MWCF-DRN-M, in which a “2D matrix i” refers to a 2-dimensional matrix of wavelet packet
coefficients obtained by using an i-tap Daubechies wavelet, abbreviated as DBi in this study, and N is the number of Daubechies wavelets in
consideration. Both MWCF-DRN-C and MWCF-DRN-M have the same RBUs as the DRN in Fig. 5.
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DRNs [24], [25]. The learning rate was initialized to 0.1 and
reduced to 0.01 at the 40th epoch and 0.001 at the 80th epoch.
The training was terminated at the 100th epoch, so that the
trainable parameters could be updated in large steps at the
beginning and slightly fine-tuned at the end of the training
process. The coefficient of momentum [5] was set to 0.9, which
is used to accelerate the training process by making use of the
update in the previous iteration. The mini-batch size was set to
128, which indicated that 128 observations were randomly
selected and fed into the deep architecture in each iteration; the
training process can be accelerated compared with feeding one
observation in each iteration. The weight decay coefficient of
L2 regularization was set to 0.0001, which was the same with
the DRN in [24].
B. Performance Comparisons
In this section, the state-of-the-art deep learning algorithms
without multi-wavelet coefficients fusion (i.e., CNN and DRN
taking a matrix of wavelet coefficients using a certain
Daubechies wavelet) were used for performance comparisons.
A 10-fold cross-validation [5] was conducted to evaluate the
methods, that is, the dataset was randomly divided into 10
subsets. In each test, one subset was used as the testing data,
and the other nine subsets were put together to be the training
data. The tests were repeated 10 times, so that each subset has a
chance to be the testing data. As a result, 10 accuracies can be
obtained for each method, and their average value (i.e., the
average accuracy) was used as the metric to evaluate the
method. Experimental results of CNN, DRN, MWCF-DRN-C,
and MWCF-DRN-M are given in Tables III-IV. The overall
average accuracies are given in Table V and discussed below.
1) Performance comparison with CNN and DRN
As mentioned above, both CNN and DRN took a matrix of
wavelet coefficients using a certain Daubechies wavelet, from
DB1 to DB30. To ensure a fair and reliable comparison, the same
hyperparameters mentioned above were adopted. As shown in
Table III, the DRN outperformed the CNN no matter which DB
was used. The overall average test accuracy of the DRN with
different DBs was 91.45%, which was 2.89% higher than CNN.
For the MWCF-DRN-C and MWCF-DRN-M methods, a
multiple set of matrices of wavelet packet coefficients using
𝑁𝑁w randomly selected Daubechies wavelets, from DB1 to DB30,
where 𝑁𝑁w = 2, 6, 10, 14, 18, 22, 26, and 30 were considered in
this study (see Table IV). The reason that the developed
methods did not consider a full factorial design was to reduce
computational burden. The same 10-fold cross-validation was
employed in performance evaluation of the developed methods.
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TABLE III
ACCURACIES OF THE CNN AND DRN USED FOR FAULT DIAGNOSIS OF THE PLANETARY GEARBOX (UNIT: %)
Training accuracy Test accuracy Training accuracy Test accuracy
CNN DRN CNN DRN CNN DRN CNN DRN
DB1 86.74 ± 2.34 94.98 ± 0.54 83.44 ± 3.01 88.41 ± 0.95 DB16 92.54 ± 1.38 97.09 ± 0.71 89.56 ± 1.96 91.97 ± 1.21
DB2 88.54 ± 1.03 96.31 ± 0.52 86.05 ± 1.50 90.57 ± 0.64 DB17 91.82 ± 1.53 97.04 ± 0.83 88.81 ± 1.58 92.03 ± 0.76
DB3 90.86 ± 2.00 96.78 ± 0.54 88.13 ± 1.83 91.21 ± 1.11 DB18 91.38 ± 0.92 96.69 ± 0.98 88.39 ± 1.39 92.18 ± 0.98
DB4 91.44 ± 1.57 96.92 ± 0.80 88.51 ± 1.50 91.26 ± 1.69 DB19 90.65 ± 2.81 96.38 ± 0.94 87.06 ± 3.21 91.37 ± 1.22
Daubechies wavelets

DB5 91.70 ± 0.91 96.93 ± 1.01 89.01 ± 1.05 92.18 ± 0.96 DB20 91.62 ± 0.72 96.66 ± 0.77 88.53 ± 1.06 91.40 ± 0.87
DB6 91.77 ± 1.60 97.15 ± 0.63 89.04 ± 1.72 91.76 ± 0.85 DB21 91.66 ± 1.22 96.16 ± 1.11 88.77 ± 1.53 91.20 ± 1.42
DB7 91.88 ± 0.62 97.03 ± 0.80 89.17 ± 0.99 91.92 ± 0.97 DB22 92.13 ± 0.49 96.56 ± 1.04 89.33 ± 1.05 91.50 ± 0.95
DB8 92.27 ± 1.44 97.32 ± 0.29 89.39 ± 1.78 92.93 ± 0.79 DB23 92.18 ± 1.31 96.22 ± 0.84 89.58 ± 1.42 91.62 ± 1.04
DB9 92.28 ± 1.64 97.28 ± 0.49 89.45 ± 1.54 91.85 ± 0.84 DB24 92.14 ± 0.59 95.78 ± 0.89 89.18 ± 0.95 90.56 ± 1.12
DB10 92.19 ± 0.58 96.78 ± 0.85 89.24 ± 1.16 91.77 ± 1.33 DB25 91.01 ± 1.60 96.69 ± 0.68 88.03 ± 1.65 91.57 ± 0.75
DB11 91.83 ± 1.90 97.07 ± 0.90 88.43 ± 2.02 92.19 ± 1.31 DB26 91.88 ± 0.90 96.11 ± 0.79 89.12 ± 0.92 91.18 ± 0.97
DB12 91.86 ± 0.84 97.01 ± 0.71 89.14 ± 1.06 92.07 ± 1.29 DB27 90.94 ± 2.05 95.96 ± 0.85 88.43 ± 2.16 90.79 ± 1.44
DB13 92.13 ± 1.61 96.88 ± 0.88 89.68 ± 1.47 91.87 ± 1.40 DB28 91.35 ± 0.42 96.36 ± 0.72 88.49 ± 0.92 91.05 ± 1.16
DB14 92.48 ± 1.33 97.05 ± 0.33 89.71 ± 1.66 92.02 ± 0.82 DB29 90.04 ± 4.05 96.31 ± 0.96 86.64 ± 3.69 90.81 ± 0.98
DB15 92.18 ± 1.09 96.71 ± 0.73 89.48 ± 1.52 91.94 ± 1.43 DB30 91.63 ± 0.60 95.42 ± 0.72 88.98 ± 1.08 90.26 ± 1.29
TABLE IV 11(d), it can be observed that the composite fault “CFB” was
ACCURACIES OF THE DEVELOPED MWCF-DRN-C AND MWCF-DRN-M
METHODS WITH RANDOMLY SELECTED DB WAVELETS (UNIT: %)
also basically separable from the other health conditions, which
Training accuracy Test accuracy means that the MWCF-DRN-C and MWCF-DRN-M are able
2
MWCF-DRN-C
97.05 ± 0.69
MWCF-DRN-M
97.00 ± 0.66
MWCF-DRN-C
91.56 ± 1.49
MWCF-DRN-M
92.41 ± 0.83
to distinguish the composite fault from the other health states.
selected Daubechies

6 98.42 ± 0.20 97.80 ± 0.63 93.07 ± 0.73 93.57 ± 0.98

# of randomly

10 98.80 ± 0.22 98.21 ± 0.23 92.72 ± 1.03 93.65 ± 0.93

wavelets

14 98.95 ± 0.31 98.38 ± 0.23 93.10 ± 0.79 93.80 ± 0.98

18 99.18 ± 0.17 98.59 ± 0.20 93.45 ± 0.85 94.13 ± 0.45
22 99.36 ± 0.13 98.55 ± 0.37 93.01 ± 0.79 93.74 ± 0.81
26 99.43 ± 0.16 98.60 ± 0.21 92.81 ± 0.78 93.94 ± 0.97
30 99.47 ± 0.09 98.69 ± 0.24 93.01 ± 0.59 93.88 ± 0.67
TABLE V
COMPARISON OF THE OVERALL AVERAGE ACCURACIES IN TABLE III AND
TABLE IV (UNIT: %)
Method Training accuracy Test accuracy
CNN 91.44 ± 1.37 88.56 ± 1.61 Fig. 8. 2D visualization of feature maps at 4 different layers in CNN with
DRN 96.59 ± 0.76 91.45 ± 1.08 DB1, which yields an accuracy of 83.06%, (a) the input layer, (b) the 7th
MWCF-DRN-C 98.83 ± 0.25 92.84 ± 0.88 convolutional layer, (c) the 13th convolutional layer, (d) the GAP layer.
MWCF-DRN-M 98.23 ± 0.35 93.64 ± 0.83

As presented in Table V, the developed MWCF-DRN-C

yielded an overall average test accuracy of 92.84%, which
achieved 4.28% and 1.39% improvements when compared with
the CNN and DRN with no multi-wavelet coefficients fusion.
Further, the developed MWCF-DRN-M achieved an overall
average test accuracy of 93.64%, which yielded 5.08% and 2.19%
improvements compared with the CNN and DRN, respectively.
To get a sense of the feature learning ability of the methods Fig. 9. 2D visualization of feature maps at 4 different layers in DRN with
(i.e., CNN, DRN, MWCF-DRN-C, and MWCF-DRN-M), DB1, which yields an accuracy of 86.57%, (a) the input layer, (b) the 3rd
RBU, (c) the 6th RBU, and (d) the GAP layer.
which further facilitates the improvement of fault diagnosis, the
feature maps at four different layers were visualized using
t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding [36], which is an
effective dimensionality reduction method to visualize
high-dimensional data in a lower-dimensional feature space.
The working effect of the deep learning methods is shown in
Figs. 8-11. It can be shown that observations of different health
conditions at the input layer were highly agglomerated and
became more and more separable at deeper layers for the CNN, Fig. 10. 2D visualization of feature maps at 4 different layers in the
MWCF-DRN-C with 30 DBs, which yields an accuracy of 92.69%, (a) the
DRN, MWCF-DRN-C, and MWCF-DRN-M; that is, these input layer, (b) the 3rd RBU, (c) the 6th RBU, and (d) the GAP layer.
methods were effective for transforming the input data to be
discriminative features through a series of nonlinear
transformations. Likewise, the learned high-level features
obtained by the MWCF-DRN-C and MWCF-DRN-M were
more separable than those obtained by the CNN and DRN
methods, as shown in Figs. 8(d), 9(d), 10(d), and 11(d), and
they were fed to the fully connected output layer to pick up
classification results. For example, the learned features for
Fig. 11. 2D visualization of feature maps at 4 different layers in the
“TRC” and “TSP” by the CNN and DRN overlapped each other, MWCF-DRN-M with 30 DBs, which yields an accuracy of 94.35%, (a)
whereas the learned features by the developed methods had few the input layer, (b) the 3rd RBU, (c) the 6th RBU, and (d) the GAP layer.
overlapped points. Additionally, as shown in Figs. 10(d) and

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This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI 10.1109/TIE.2018.2866050, IEEE
Transactions on Industrial Electronics
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS
2) Performance comparison between MWCF-DRN-C
and MWCF-DRN-M
As illustrated in Table V, the MWCF-DRN-M method
slightly outperformed the MWCF-DRN-C method, achieving
0.80% improvement in terms of test accuracy. The input indeed
involves many redundant wavelet coefficients; the developed
MWCF-DRN-M method effectively eliminated redundant
information via the element-wise maximization operation and
reduced the degree of complexity when optimizing trainable
weights during the training process, whereas the
MWCF-DRN-C method had to optimize the weights in the
convolutional layer to eliminate the redundant information and
its high-level features might still contain much redundant
information even after the training process.
Figs. 10(d) and 11(d) illustrate the high-level feature maps
using the developed MWCF-DRN-C and MWCF-DRN-M in a
lower-dimensional feature space, respectively. The “TRC” and
“TSP” under the MWCF-DRN-M scheme were more
agglomerated with themselves than under the MWCF-DRN-C
scheme. This was the reason why the MWCF-DRN-M
outperformed the MWCF-DRN-C in terms of test accuracy.
C. Discussion on the Limitations of the Developed
Methods
However, a long-standing issue with machine
learning-powered fault diagnosis applications is that they often
need to deal with a new fault (or a new composition of multiple
faults) that was not met before. According to the nature of
supervised learning, the new fault would be misclassified into
one of the classes in consideration during the training process.
A promising solution to this problem is to develop a method to
measure the degree of membership for unseen data, where the
degree of membership can be defined as the probability that the
unseen test data belongs to each of the classes in consideration.
If none of the degrees is larger than a pre-defined threshold, the
test data (e.g., a fault not met before) would be classified into an
unknown class.
Another unsolved problem with machine learning-powered
fault diagnosis applications is how to deal with the same faults
with different intensities. Domain adaptation, which refers to a
group of techniques that aim to improve the performance of a
task by using the knowledge from a closely related domain, can
probably be used to address this problem. For example, the
difference between the distributions of the same fault at
different intensities can be narrowed using some domain
adaptation methods, so that a model trained on one intensity can
correctly identify the fault under the other intensities.
Additionally, to apply the developed methods in industry, the
following limitations at least need to be addressed. First,
unsupervised and semi-supervised versions of the developed
methods should be developed, because it is not easy to obtain
labelled data. Second, the developed methods were trained on
balanced datasets in this study. However, in general, deep
learning algorithms often yielded relatively low performance
on imbalanced datasets. Thus, it will be necessary to explore
the impact of the developed methods on imbalanced datasets. If
needed, the integration of generative adversarial network-based
approaches into the developed methods will be investigated for
the sake of balancing class distributions.
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V. CONCLUSIONS
This paper developed two methods to fuse multi-wavelet
coefficients in DRNs and thus address the challenges in finding
a good set of features for vibration-based fault diagnosis under
non-stationary operating conditions. The MWCF-DRN-C
method simply concatenated a series of 64 × 64 matrices of
wavelet coefficients and used them as an input of the following
convolutional layer in a DRN, whereas the MWCF-DRN-M
method exploited a combination of the individual convolutional
layers connected to 2D matrices of wavelet packet coefficients
and the maximization layer at the early stage of a DRN to
capture and amplify discriminative information from the input.
The usefulness of the developed methods was verified by
performance comparisons in planetary gearbox fault diagnosis
with state-of-the-art deep learning methods (i.e., CNN and
DRN) with no multi-wavelet coefficients fusion concept.
Experimental results indicated that the developed
MWCF-DRN-C and MWCF-DRN-M methods outperformed
the CNN- and DRN-based methods by yielding 4.28% and
5.08%, 1.39% and 2.19% performance improvements in terms
of average test accuracy (10-fold cross-validation), respectively.
These improvements were due to the use of diverse sets of
wavelet coefficients with associated trainable weights to adjust
the significance of wavelet coefficients for fault diagnosis.
Likewise, the MWCF-DRN-M method was superior to the
MWCF-DRN-C method by slightly improving diagnostic
performance–that is, 0.80% performance improvement in terms
of average test accuracy. The MWCF-DRN-M method was
effective for reducing redundancy in multiple 64 × 64 matrices
of wavelet coefficients by a maximization layer, which further
enabled the alleviation of DRN’s burden to learn discriminative
features. Although the MWCF-DRN-C reduced redundancy by
applying trainable weights to multiple 64 × 64 matrices,
optimizing these weights was not an easy task.
Further, the underlying structure of the developed methods
can be applicable to various time-frequency analysis methods
(e.g., local mean decomposition, empirical wavelet transform,
and Wigner-Ville distribution), and data (e.g., vibration signals,
current signals, and acoustic signals) for fault diagnosis.
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Transactions on Industrial Electronics
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15, 2014. University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA, from 2016 to 2017. His
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Signals Based on Wavelet Packet Transform and Manifold Learning for from the University of Ulsan, Ulsan, South Korea,
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Networks with Privileged Information,” in Proc. International Joint University, Chongqing, China.
Conferences on Artificial Intelligence, 19-25 August 2017, Australia. He is currently a professor and Ph.D.
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Recognition,” in Proc. 2016 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Engineering, Chongqing University, Chongqing,
Pattern Recognition, 27-30 June 2016, Seattle, WA, USA, pp. 770–778. China. His main research interests include
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Vision, 8-16 October, 2016, Amsterdam, Netherlands, pp. 630–645. prediction, and measurement technology and instruments.
[26] Drivetrain diagnostics simulator, Dr. Tang won a National Scientific and Technological Progress 2nd
http://spectraquest.com/drivetrains/details/dds/ Prize of China in 2004 and a National Invention 2nd Prize of China in
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Conf. Comput. Vis. Pattern Recognit., Las Vegas, NA, USA, Jun. 26–Jul. the B.S. degree in acoustics, the M.S. degrees in
1, 2016, pp. 2818–2826. electrical engineering and engineering
[28] S. Ioffe and C. Szegedy, “Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep mechanics, and the Ph.D. degree in engineering
Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift,” in Proc. 32nd mechanics from the University of Wisconsin at
International Conference on Machine Learning, 7-9 July 2015, Lille, Madison, Madison, WI, USA, in 1982.
France, pp. 448–456. He is the Founder of the Center for Advanced
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Classifiers,” Neural Comput. Appl., vol. 7, no. 4, pp. 334–342, 1998. Maryland, College Park, MD, USA, where he is
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Learning,” in Proc. International Conference on Learning Dr. Pecht is a Professional Engineer and an American Society of
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[31] M. Suganuma, S. Shirakawa, and T. Nagao, “A Genetic Programming Undergraduate Teaching Award and the International Microelectronics
Approach to Designing Convolutional Neural Network Architectures,” in Assembly and Packaging Society (IMAPS) William D. Ashman Memorial
Proc. the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, 15-19 July Achievement Award for his contribution in electronics reliability analysis.

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