A gradient aligned domain adversarial network for unsupervised intelligent fault diagnosis of gearboxes

Unsupervised domain adaptation alleviates the dependencies of conventional fault diagnosis methods on sufficient labeled data and strict data distributions. Nonetheless, the current domain adaptation methods only concentrate on the data distributions and ignore the feature gradient distributions, leading to some samples being misclassified due to large gradient discrepancies, thus affecting diagnosis performance. In this paper, a gradient aligned domain adversarial network (GADAN) is proposed. First, the discrepancies of the marginal and conditional distribution between the source and target domain are reduced by minimizing the joint maximum mean discrepancy. Then, a pseudo-labeling approach based on a clustering self-supervised strategy is utilized to attain high-quality pseudo-labels of target domains, and most importantly in the dimension of the data gradient, the feature gradient distributions are aligned by adversarial learning to further reduce the domain shift, even if the distributions of the two domains are close enough. Finally, experiments and engineering applications demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of GADAN for transfer diagnosis between various working conditions or different machines.