Calibrated Adaptive Teacher for Domain-Adaptive Intelligent Fault Diagnosis

Intelligent fault diagnosis (IFD) based on deep learning can achieve high accuracy from raw condition monitoring signals. However, models usually perform well on the training distribution only, and experience severe performance drops when applied to a different distribution. This is also observed in fault diagnosis, where assets are often operated in working conditions different from the ones in which the labeled data have been collected. The scenario where labeled data are available in a source domain and only unlabeled data are available in a target domain has been addressed recently by unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) approaches for IFD. Recent methods have relied on self-training with confident pseudo-labels for the unlabeled target samples. However, the confidence-based selection of pseudo-labels is hindered by poorly calibrated uncertainty estimates in the target domain, primarily due to over-confident predictions, which limits the quality of pseudo-labels and leads to error accumulation. In this paper, we propose a novel method called Calibrated Adaptive Teacher (CAT), where we propose to calibrate the predictions of the teacher network on target samples throughout the self-training process, leveraging post hoc calibration techniques. We evaluate CAT on domain-adaptive IFD and perform extensive experiments on the Paderborn University (PU) benchmark for fault diagnosis of rolling bearings under varying operating conditions, using both time- and frequency-domain inputs. We compare four different calibration techniques within our framework, where temperature scaling is both the most effective and lightweight one. The resulting method-CAT+TempScaling-achieves state-of-the-art performance on most transfer tasks, with on average 7.5% higher accuracy and 4 times lower calibration error compared to domain-adversarial neural networks (DANNs) across the twelve PU transfer tasks.