Multireceptive Field Graph Convolutional Networks for Machine Fault Diagnosis

Deep learning (DL) based methods have swept the field of mechanical fault diagnosis, because of the powerful ability of feature representation. However, many of existing DL methods fail in relationship mining between signals explicitly. Unlike those deep neural networks, graph convolutional networks (GCNs) taking graph data with topological structure as input is more efficient for data relationship mining, making GCN to be powerful for feature representation from graph data in non-Euclidean space. Nevertheless, existing GCNs have two limitations. First, most GCNs are constructed on unweighted graphs, considering importance of neighbors as the same, which is not in line with reality. Second, the receptive field of GCNs is fixed, which limits the effectiveness of GCNs for feature representation. To address these issues, a multireceptive field graph convolutional network (MRF-GCN) is proposed for effective intelligent fault diagnosis. In MRF-GCN, data samples are converted into weighted graphs to indicate differences in relationship of data samples. Moreover, MRF-GCN learns not only features from different receptive field, but also fuses learned features as an enhanced feature representation. To verify the efficacy of MRF-GCN for machine fault diagnosis, case studies are implemented, and the results show that MRF-GCN can achieve superior performance even under imbalanced dataset.