A Moving Window-Based Feature Extraction Method for Gearbox Fault Detection Using Vibration Signals

Early gearbox defect detection is imperative for reducing unplanned downtime, ensuring reliability and efficiency, and minimizing maintenance expenses. In recent years, with the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and digital transformation, gearbox defect detection using AI has gained popularity. Machine learning (ML) classifiers are very popular and transform gearbox condition monitoring from manual to automatic monitoring systems. This work proposes a moving window-based method for extracting statistical features from recorded vibration signals from the gearbox. The extracted features were used to train traditional ML classifiers. Moving window sizes of 300, 400, 500, 600, 700, and 800 were applied to extract statistical features from the publicly available benchmark dataset. The six different moving window sizes caused six types of datasets, each one corresponding to the moving window size. The generated datasets were partitioned using the K-fold cross-validation method to train and test ML models. This study explored and evaluated seven prominent ML classifiers: Decision Tree, Random Forest, Support Vector Machine (SVM), Naïve Bayes, K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), Gradient Boosting Classifier (GBC), and Logistic Regression. The experimental results demonstrated that SVM, Logistic Regression, and GBC can outperform other ML classifiers. The experimental results in terms of accuracy, precision, and recall revealed that the ML classifier’s performance improves as the size of the moving window used for feature extraction increases.