Leveraging Label Information in a Knowledge-Driven Approach for Rolling-Element Bearings Remaining Useful Life Prediction

Since bearing deterioration patterns are difficult to collect from real, long lifetime scenarios, data-driven research has been directed towards recovering them by imposing accelerated life tests. Consequently, insufficiently recovered features due to rapid damage propagation seem more likely to lead to poorly generalized learning machines. Knowledge-driven learning comes as a solution by providing prior assumptions from transfer learning. Likewise, the absence of true labels was able to create inconsistency related problems between samples, and teacher-given label behaviors led to more ill-posed predictors. Therefore, in an attempt to overcome the incomplete, unlabeled data drawbacks, a new autoencoder has been designed as an additional source that could correlate inputs and labels by exploiting label information in a completely unsupervised learning scheme. Additionally, its stacked denoising version seems to more robustly be able to recover them for new unseen data. Due to the non-stationary and sequentially driven nature of samples, recovered representations have been fed into a transfer learning, convolutional, long–short-term memory neural network for further meaningful learning representations. The assessment procedures were benchmarked against recent methods under different training datasets. The obtained results led to more efficiency confirming the strength of the new learning path.