Wavelet-like convolutional neural network structure for time-series data classification

Time-series data often contain one of the most valuable pieces of information in many fields including manufacturing. Because time-series data are relatively cheap to acquire, they (e.g., vibration signals) have become a crucial part of big data even in manufacturing shop floors. Recently, deep-learning models have shown state-of-art performance for analyzing big data because of their sophisticated structures and considerable computational power. Traditional models for a machinery-monitoring system have highly relied on features selected by human experts. In addition, the representational power of such models fails as the data distribution becomes complicated. On the other hand, deep-learning models automatically select highly abstracted features during the optimization process, and their representational power is better than that of traditional neural network models. However, the applicability of deep-learning models to the field of prognostics and health management (PHM) has not been well investigated yet. This study integrates the "residual fitting" mechanism inherently embedded in the wavelet transform into the convolutional neural network deep-learning structure. As a result, the architecture combines a signal smoother and classification procedures into a single model. Validation results from rotor vibration data demonstrate that our model outperforms all other off-the-shelf feature-based models.