Two-step fault diagnosis framework for rolling element bearings with imbalanced data based on GSA-WELM and GSA-ELM

Rolling element bearings constitute the key parts on rotating machinery, and their fault diagnosis is of great importance. In many real bearing fault diagnosis applications, the number of fault data is much less than the number of normal data, i.e. the data are imbalanced. Many traditional diagnosis methods will get low accuracy because they have a natural tendency to favor the majority class by assuming balanced class distribution or equal misclassification cost. To deal with imbalanced data, in this article, a novel two-step fault diagnosis framework is proposed to diagnose the status of rolling element bearings. Our proposed framework consists of two steps for fault diagnosis, where Step 1 makes use of weighted extreme learning machine in an effort to classify the normal or abnormal categories, and Step 2 further diagnoses the underlying anomaly in detail by using preliminary extreme learning machine. In addition, gravitational search algorithm is applied to further extract the significant features and determine the optimal parameters of the weighted extreme learning machine and extreme learning machine classifiers. The effectiveness of our proposed approach is testified on the raw data collected from the rolling element bearing experiments conducted in our Institute, and the empirical results show that our approach is really fast and can achieve the diagnosis accuracies more than 96%.