Ensemble transfer CNNs driven by multi-channel signals for fault diagnosis of rotating machinery cross working conditions

Automatic and reliable fault diagnosis of rotating machinery cross working conditions is of practical importance. For this purpose, ensemble transfer convolutional neural networks (CNNs) driven by multi-channel signals are proposed in this paper. Firstly, a series of source CNNs modified with stochastic pooling and Leaky rectified linear unit (LReLU) are pre-trained using multi-channel signals. Secondly, the learned parameter knowledge of each individual source CNN is transferred to initialize the corresponding target CNN which is then fine-tuned by a few target training samples. Finally, a new decision fusion strategy is designed to flexibly fuse each individual target CNN to obtain the comprehensive result. The proposed method is used to analyze multi-channel signals measured from rotating machinery. The comparison result shows the superiorities of the proposed method over the existing deep transfer learning methods. •CNN is modified with stochastic pooling and Leaky rectified linear unit.•Multi-channel signals are used to pre-train a series of CNNs.•Transfer CNN is constructed with parameter transfer strategy.•A new decision fusion strategy is designed based on flexible weight assignment.