Clustering-guided novel unsupervised domain adversarial network for partial transfer fault diagnosis of rotating machinery

Unsupervised partial transfer fault diagnosis studies of rotating machinery have practical significance, which still exists some challenges, for example, the learned domain-specific statistics and parameters usually influence the learning effect of target-domain features to some degree, and the relatively scattered target-domain features will lead to negative transfer. To overcome those limitations and further improve partial transfer fault diagnosis performance, a clustering-guided novel unsupervised domain adversarial network is proposed in this paper. Firstly, a novel unsupervised domain adversarial network is constructed using domain-specific batch normalization to remove domain-specific information to enhance alignment between source and target domains. Secondly, embedded clustering strategy is designed to learn tightly clustered target-domain features to suppress negative transfer in partial domain adaptation process. Finally, a joint optimization objective function is defined to balance different losses to improve the training and diagnosis performance. Two experimental cases of bevel gearbox and bearing are used to validate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method in solving unsupervised partial transfer fault diagnosis problems.