Class imbalanced fault diagnosis via combining k-means clustering algorithm with generative adversarial networks

Recent advancements in machine learning and communication technologies have enabled new approaches to automated fault diagnosis and detection in industrial systems. Given wide variation in occurrence frequencies of different classes of faults, the class distribution of real-world industrial fault data is usually imbalanced. However, most prior machine learningbased classification methods do not take this imbalance into consideration, and thus tend to be biased toward recognizing the majority classes and result in poor accuracy for minority ones. To solve such problems, we propose a k-means clustering generative adversarial network (KM-GAN)-based fault diagnosis approach able to reduce imbalance in fault data and improve diagnostic accuracy for minority classes. First, we design a new k-means clustering algorithm and GAN-based oversampling method to generate diverse minority-class samples obeying the similar distribution to the original minority data. The k-means clustering algorithm is adopted to divide minorityclass samples into k clusters, while a GAN is applied to learn the data distribution of the resulting clusters and generate a given number of minority-class samples as a supplement to the original dataset. Then, we construct a deep neural network (DNN) and deep belief network (DBN)-based heterogeneous ensemble model as a fault classifier to improve generalization, in which DNN and DBN models are trained separately on the resulting dataset, and then the outputs from both are averaged as the final diagnostic result. A series of comparative experiments are conducted to verify the effectiveness of our proposedmethod, and the experimental results show that our method can improve diagnostic accuracy for minority-class samples.