Bearing Health Monitoring Using Relief-F-Based Feature Relevance Analysis and HMM

Nowadays, bearings installed in industrial electric motors are constituted as the primary mode of a failure affecting the global energy consumption. Since industries’ energy demand has a growing tendency, interest for efficient maintenance in electric motors is decisive. Vibration signals from bearings are employed commonly as a non-invasive approach to support fault diagnosis and severity evaluation of rotating machinery. However, vibration-based diagnosis poses a challenge concerning the signal properties, e.g., highly dynamic and non-stationary. Here, we introduce a knowledge-based tool to analyze multiple health conditions in bearings. Our approach includes a stochastic feature selection method, termed Stochastic Feature Selection (SFS), highlighting and interpreting relevant multi-domain attributes (time, frequency, and time–frequency) related to the bearing faults discriminability. In particular, a relief-F-based ranking and a Hidden Markov Model are trained under a windowing scheme to achieve our SFS. Obtained results in a public database demonstrate that our proposal is competitive compared to state-of-the-art algorithms concerning both the number of features selected and the classification accuracy.