Rolling Bearing Fault Diagnosis Under Variable Operating Conditions Using Group Sparse Reconstruction and Multi-Strategy Improved Quantum Particle Swarm Optimized RVM

To address the problems of enhanced non-stationarity, significant feature distribution shift, and insufficient cross-condition generalization capability of traditional fault diagnosis methods under variable operating conditions such as varying speed and load, a rolling bearing fault diagnosis method integrating group sparse reconstruction and a multi-strategy improved quantum particle swarm optimization-based relevance vector machine (RVM) is proposed. First, group sparse representation learning is employed to reconstruct the original vibration signals, thereby suppressing background noise and enhancing fault-related impulsive components to improve signal separability and stability. Subsequently, a modal component selection criterion combining kurtosis and correlation coefficients is introduced to optimize and reconstruct the decomposed modal components, enabling the reconstructed signals to retain more fault-sensitive information. On this basis, multiple information entropy features are extracted from the reconstructed signals to construct high-dimensional state feature vectors for comprehensively characterizing the dynamic operating states of rolling bearings. To further enhance the parameter optimization capability, Chebyshev chaotic mapping is incorporated into the quantum particle swarm optimization (QPSO) algorithm to improve the uniformity of population initialization. Meanwhile, a Cauchy mutation strategy is introduced to strengthen the global search capability and avoid premature convergence, thereby forming a multi-strategy improved QPSO algorithm. Finally, the improved optimization algorithm is utilized to adaptively optimize the key hyperparameters of the RVM, resulting in a fault diagnosis model with high accuracy, strong generalization capability, and sparse characteristics. Experimental validation on the HUST and XJTU-SY bearing datasets demonstrates that the proposed MIQPSO-RVM framework achieves diagnostic accuracies of 96.70% and 94.83%, respectively. Compared with several representative intelligent diagnosis methods and deep learning models, the proposed method exhibits superior diagnostic performance, robustness, and generalization capability under complex operating conditions.