A Novel Vehicle Gearbox Fault Diagnosis Approach Based on Collective Anomaly Detection

Targeting the problem of gearbox fault diagnosis, we proposed a novel semi-supervised approach based on collective anomaly detection. Based on the limited sample data, the principle of the approach is to detect whether a test dataset contains abnormal patterns by using data distribution as the metric. The sequence obeying unexpected distribution will be identified as collective anomaly, which may be generated by fault patterns. The approach consists of three steps. First, the mixture of multivariate Gaussian distribution is used to fit the structure of sample dataset and test dataset. Then, based on maximum likelihood estimate algorithm, we hope to search the optimal parameters which can fit the data distribution with the highest degree. Finally, the fixed point iteration algorithm is used to solve likelihood estimate functions. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach can be used to find fault patterns of gearbox without the prior knowledge of their generated mechanisms.