On the Usefulness of Pre-processing Methods in Rotating Machines Faults Classification using Artificial Neural Network

This work presents a multi-fault classification system using artificial neural network (ANN) to distinguish between different faults in rotating machines automatically. Rotation frequency and statistical features, including mean, entropy, and kurtosis were considered in the proposed model. The effectiveness of this model lies in using Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE) to overcome the problem of imbalance data classes. Furthermore, the Relief feature selection method was used to find the most influencing features and thus improve the performance of the model. Machinery Fault Database (MAFAULDA) was deployed to evaluate the performance of the prediction models, achieving an accuracy of 97.1% which surpasses other literature that used the same database. Results indicate that handling imbalance classes hold a key role in increasing the overall accuracy and generalizability of multilayer perceptron (MLP) classifier. Furthermore, results showed that considering only statistical features and rotational speed are good enough to get a model with high classification accuracy.