A Novel Transfer Kernel Enabled Kernel Extreme Learning Machine Model for Cross-Domain Condition Monitoring and Fault Diagnosis of Bearings

Kernel transfer learning (KTL), as a kind of statistical transfer learning (STL), has provided significant solutions for cross-domain condition monitoring and fault diagnosis of bearings due to its ability to capture relationships and reduce the gap between source and target domains. However, most conventional kernel transfer methods only set a weighting parameter ranging from 0 to 1 for those functions measuring cross-domain differences, while the intra-domain differences are ignored, which fails to completely characterize the distributional differences to some extent. To overcome these challenges, a novel transfer kernel enabled kernel extreme learning machine (TK-KELM) model is proposed. For model pre-training, a parallel structure is designed to represent the state and change of vibration signals more comprehensively. Subsequently, intra-domain correlation is introduced into the kernel function, which aims to release the weight parameters that describe the inter-domain correlation and break the range limit of 0–1. Consequently, intra-domain as well as inter-domain correlations can boost the authenticity of the transfer kernel jointly. Furthermore, a similarity-guided feature-directed transfer kernel optimization strategy (SFTKOS) is proposed to refine model parameters by calculating domain similarity across different feature scales. Subsequently, the kernels extracted from different scales are fused as the core functions of TK-KELM. In addition, an integration framework via function principal component analysis with maximum mean difference (FPCA-MMD) is designed to extract the multi-scale domain-invariant degradation indicator for boosting the performance of TK-KELM. Finally, related experiments verify the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed TK-KELM model, improving the accuracy of condition monitoring and fault diagnosis.