A reinforcement ensemble deep transfer learning network for rolling bearing fault diagnosis with Multi-source domains

Fault diagnosis with transfer learning has achieved great attention. However, existing methods mostly focused on single-source-single-target sceneries. In some cases, there may exist multiple source domains. Therefore, a reinforcement ensemble deep transfer learning network (REDTLN) is proposed for fault diagnosis with multi-source domains. Firstly, various new kernel maximum mean discrepancies (kMMDs) are used to construct multiple deep transfer learning networks (DTLNs) for single-source-single-target domain adaptation. The differences of kernel functions and source domains can help the DTLNs learn diverse transferable features. Secondly, a new unified metric is designed based on kMMD and diversity measures for unsupervised ensemble learning. Finally, using the unified metric as the reward, a reinforcement learning method is firstly explored to generate an effective combination rule for multi-domain-multi-model reinforcement ensemble. The proposed method is verified with experiment datasets, and the results empirically show its effectiveness and superiority compared with other methods.