Multisensor Deep Clustering Networks With Joint Learning Strategy for Fault Diagnosis Considering Consensus-Specific Constraint

The deep clustering method has been successfully employed for fault diagnosis due to its remarkable ability to extract deep representation features, particularly in scenarios where labeled data is unavailable. However, the separate learning strategy utilized in deep clustering-based fault diagnosis methods leads to sub-optimal fault diagnosis results, and the consensus representation feature present in multi-sensor industrial data is not fully explored to improve the effectiveness of fault diagnosis. To address the above problems, a novel deep clustering method named Multi-sensor Deep Clustering Networks with joint learning strategy (MsDCN) is proposed for fault diagnosis, which can comprehensively utilize the industrial multi-sensor data and enable joint optimization. First, the Commonality-net uses a sensor-aware attentive encoder (SaAE) to integrate multi-sensor industrial data and extract the consensus representation feature. Second, the Individuality-net is established to extract the specific representation features of multi-sensor industrial data. Finally, a joint multisensor deep clustering learning strategy including consensus-specific constraints is designed to optimize the networks jointly and learn the consensus representation feature with consistent and complementary information. Extensive experiments on the gearbox and bearing datasets validate the proposed MsDCN. The results indicate that the proposed MsDCN can generate a reliable consensus representation feature to achieve better fault diagnosis performance than other benchmark methods. Moreover, its capability to enhance multi-sensor fault diagnosis with unlabeled data highlights its potential for real-world applications.