Based on Soft Competition ART Neural Network Ensemble and Its Application to the Fault Diagnosis of Bearing

This paper presents a novel method for fault diagnosis based on an improved adaptive resonance theory (ART) neural network and ensemble technique. The method consists of three stages. Firstly, the improved ART neural network is comprised of the soft competition technique based on fuzzy competitive learning (FCL) and ART based on Yu’s norm, the neural nodes in the competition layer are trained according to the degree of membership between the mode node and the input, and then fault samples are classified in turn. Secondly, with the distance evaluation technique, the optimal features are obtained from the statistical characteristics of original signals and wavelet coefficients. Finally, the optimal features are input into the neural network ensemble (NNE) based on voting method to identify the different fault categories. The proposed method is applied to the fault diagnosis of rolling element bearings, and testing results show that the neural network ensemble can reliably classify different fault categories and the degree of faults, which has a better classification performance compared with the single neural network.