Expert Systems with Applications 37 (2010) 1419–1430

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Expert Systems with Applications

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/eswa

A multidimensional hybrid intelligent method for gear fault diagnosis

Yaguo Lei a, Ming J. Zuo a,*, Zhengjia He b, Yanyang Zi b
a
Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T6G2G8
b
State Key Laboratory for Manufacturing Systems Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an 710049, PR China

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Keywords: Identifying gear damage categories, especially for early faults and combined faults, is a challenging task in
Feature extraction gear fault diagnosis. This paper proposes a new multidimensional hybrid intelligent diagnosis method to
Hybrid intelligent method identify different categories and levels of gear damage automatically. In this method, Hilbert transform,
Classifier combination wavelet packet transform (WPT) and empirical mode decomposition (EMD) are performed on gear vibra-
Gear fault diagnosis
tion signals to extract additional fault characteristic information. Then, multidimensional feature sets
including time-domain, frequency-domain and time–frequency-domain features are generated to reveal
gear health conditions. Multiple classifiers based on several classification algorithms and input features
are combined with genetic algorithm (GA). Because of the use of multidimensional features and the com-
bination of multiple classifiers, more accurate diagnosis results are expected with the proposed method.
Experiments with different gear damage categories and damage levels were conducted, and the vibration
signals were captured under different loads and motor speeds. The proposed method is applied to the col-
lected signals to identify the gear damage categories and damage levels. The diagnosis results show it can
reliably recognize single damage modes, combined damage modes, and damage levels.
Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction approaches are needed which allow relatively unskilled operators

Gearboxes are one of the fundamental and most important
parts of rotating machinery employed in industries. Their function
is to transfer speed and power from one shaft to another. Their typ-
ical applications include airplanes, automobiles, power turbines,
and steel mills. If faults occur in critical gears of these machines
during operation, serious consequences may occur. Therefore, fault
diagnosis of gearboxes is crucial to prevent the mechanical system
from malfunction that could cause damage or the entire system to
halt, even personal casualties (Loutridis, 2008). Therefore, it is crit-
ical to detect and diagnose early faults that may develop in such
gearboxes.
Different fault diagnosis methods have been developed and
used to detect and diagnose gear faults. One of the principal tools
for diagnosing gear faults is the vibration-based analysis because of
the ease of vibration measurements (Halima, Shoukat Choudhury,
Shah, & Zuo, 2008; Jafarizadeh, Hassannejad, Ettefagh, & Chitsaz,
2008; Zuo, Lin, & Fan, 2005). Through the use of signal processing
techniques, it is possible to obtain vital diagnostic information
from the vibration signals (Lei, He, & Zi, 2008; Lei, He, Zi, & Chen,
2008; Loutridis, 2008). However, many techniques available today
require a good deal of expertise to apply them successfully. Simpler
* Corresponding author.
E-mail address: ming.zuo@ualberta.ca (M.J. Zuo).
to make reliable decisions without the need for a diagnosis special-
ist to examine the gear vibration signals. Therefore, there is a de-
mand for techniques that can generate decision options on gear
conditions automatically and reliably.
Artificial intelligent techniques, such as artificial neural net-
works (ANN), fuzzy logic and genetic algorithms (GA), have been
successfully applied to automated detection and diagnosis of gears
(Abumahfouz, 2005; Rafiee, Arvani, Harifi, & Sadeghi, 2007; Sa-
manta, 2004). They increase the reliability of gear fault detection
and diagnosis systems. To overcome the limitations of individual
classifiers based on artificial intelligent techniques and achieve
higher performance, the combination of multiple classifiers has
been intensively studied recently (Bi, Guan, & Bell, 2008; Hue-
nupán, Yoma, & Molina, 2008; Rasheed, Stashuk, & Kamel, 2008).
Classifiers differing in classification algorithms or input feature
sets usually exhibit complementary classification behaviors. Thus,
if the classification results of multiple classifiers, which employ
different classification algorithms or different input feature sets,
are combined by integration techniques to yield the final classifica-
tion result, the final performance is expected to be superior to the
best performance of a single classifier (Fumera & Roli, 2005; Kittler,
Hatef, Duin, & Matas, 1998). The weighted averaging technique is
the simplest and most widely used technique combining multiple
classifiers, which assigns a nonnegative weight to each individual
classifier. By optimizing an objective function, the classifier
weights can be estimated using various techniques.

0957-4174/$ - see front matter Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.eswa.2009.06.060
1420 Y. Lei et al. / Expert Systems with Applications 37 (2010) 1419–1430

In this paper, a multidimensional hybrid intelligent diagnosis

method via multiple classifier combination and using different do- (2) Root mean square (RMS)
main feature sets is proposed to recognize early faults and com- vffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
u n
bined faults occurring in gears. To obtain additional fault
u1 X 2
RMS ¼ t ðxi Þ ð2Þ
characteristic information, time- and frequency-domain features n i¼1
are extracted from the gear vibration signals and their frequency
spectra. Moreover, wavelet packet transform (WPT) and empirical
mode decomposition (EMD), two advanced time–frequency analy- (3) Kurtosis (KR)
sis techniques, are applied to decomposing the vibration signals. P
n ni¼1 ðxi  xÞ4
Then energy features are extracted from both the decomposed fre- KR ¼  2 ð3Þ
Pn
quency-band signals of WPT and the intrinsic mode functions 2
i¼1 ðxi  xÞ
(IMFs) of EMD. As a result, we have extracted multidimensional
features that include not only the time- and frequency-domain fea-
tures but also time–frequency-domain features from the vibration (4) Crest factor (CF)
signals. The multidimensional features extracted from the three max jxi j
domains can reflect the gear conditions from different perspec- CF ¼ qffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
Pn ffi ð4Þ
1 2
tives. They are then input into the classical classifiers based on n i¼1 ðxi Þ
multi-layer perceptron (MLP) neural network, radial basis function
(RBF) neural network, and K nearest neighbor (KNN) classification
algorithms. These three classification algorithms are created based (5) Shape factor (SF)
on different classification principles and therefore exhibit comple- qffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
Pn ffi
1 2
mentary classification performance. In order to improve the iden- n i¼1 ðxi Þ
SF ¼ 1 Pn ð5Þ
tification accuracy of gear damage in this paper, the nine i¼1 jxi j
n
classification results of these three classification algorithms using
the input features from the three different domains are combined Then, the following six additional time-domain features are
by genetic algorithm (GA) to come up with the final diagnosis extracted, which were specifically developed for gear damage
result. detection and reported in several NASA technical reports
In comparison with the fault diagnosis methods based on multi- (Decker, 2003; Decker & Lewicki, 2003) but seldom cited in
ple classifier combination reported in Zio, Baraldi, and Gola (2008) the published literature (Samuel & Pines, 2005). The applica-
Lei, He, Zi, and Hu (2007), the proposed method in this paper em- tion results to helicopter gearbox systems reported in the
ploys not only different feature sets as Zio et al. (2008) and Lei et al. NASA reports suggest that these features display different de-
(2007) did, but also complementary classification algorithms. Thus, grees of effectiveness in detecting gear damage. These features
it possesses a more powerful classification capability. are defined as follows (Decker, 2003; Decker & Lewicki, 2003;
Experiments on a gearbox test rig were carried out to verify the Samuel & Pines, 2005; Zuo, Li, & Fan, 2005).
effectiveness of the proposed multidimensional hybrid intelligent (6) FM0
diagnosis method. Gears with a chipped tooth, a missing tooth PP x
and several levels of crack were installed in the test rig and vibra- FM0 ¼ PH ð6Þ
h¼0 P h
tion signals were collected under various loads and motor speeds.
The diagnosis results validate that the proposed method is able to where PPx is the maximum peak-to-peak value of signal x, Ph is
recognize the gear damage categories as well as damage levels the amplitude of the hth harmonic of the meshing frequency,
effectively. and H is the total number of harmonics considered.

(7) FM4
2. Feature extraction P  4
n ni¼1 ðdi  dÞ
FM4 ¼  2 ð7Þ
2.1. Time-domain feature extraction Pn  2
i¼1 ðdi  dÞ

The time-domain signal collected from a gearbox usually where di is the ith measurement of the difference signal of the
changes when damage occurs in a gear. Both its amplitude and dis- signal xand d is the average of the difference signal. The shaft
tribution may be different from those of the time-domain signal of frequencies and their harmonics, the meshing frequencies and
a normal gear. Root mean square reflects the vibration amplitude their harmonics, and all first-order sidebands are defined to be
and energy in time domain. Standard deviation, kurtosis, crest fac- the regular meshing components. By removing the regular
tor and shape factor may be used to represent the time series dis- meshing components from signal x, the so called difference
tribution of the signal in the time domain. signal is generated. FM4 is actually the kurtosis of the differ-
First, five time-domain features, namely, standard deviation, ence signal. It is designed to complement FM0 by detecting
root mean square, kurtosis, crest factor and shape factor, are calcu- damage isolated to only a limited number of teeth and sup-
lated. They are defined as follows. posed to work well for detection of initial faults.
(1) Standard deviation (STD)
(8) NA4
vffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
u Pn
u 1 X n 1 4
i¼1 ðr i  r Þ
STD ¼ t ðxi  xÞ2 ð1Þ NA4 ¼  
n
2 ð8Þ
ðn  1Þ i¼1 1
PN 1
P n 2
N j¼1 n k¼1 ðr jk  r j Þ

where xi ði ¼ 1; . . . ; nÞ is ith sampling point of the signal x; n is where ri is the ith measurement of the residual signal of time
the number of points in the signal, and x is the average of the record xi and r is the average of r i , r jk is the kth measurement
signal. in the jth time record residual signal r j , rj is the average of r j ,
 Y. Lei et al. / Expert Systems with Applications 37 (2010) 1419–1430
and N is the number of time records in a run ensemble. The
complete data series collected is called a run ensemble. It is
further divided into N time records each including n data
points. The residual signal is generated by removing the regu-
lar meshing elements which include the shaft frequencies and
their harmonics, and the meshing frequencies and their har-
monics. NA4 is created to overcome the shortcoming of FM4
that becomes less sensitive to the progression of fault in both
number and severity. For this reason, it is supposed to be able
to not only detect the onset of fault, as FM4 does, but also con-
tinue to react to the damage as it spreads and increases in
magnitude.
(9) NB4
Pn
1 4
i¼1 ðsi  sÞ
n
NB4 ¼   2
1
PN 1 Pn 2
k¼1 ðsjk  sj Þ
N j¼1 n
where sðtÞ is the envelope expressed as sðtÞ ¼ jbðtÞþ
ifH½bðtÞgj; bðtÞ is the signal bandpass filtered about the meshing
frequency, H½bðtÞ is the Hilbert transform of bðtÞ, sjk is the kth
measurement in the jth time record envelope sj ; sj is the average
of sj , and N is the number of time records in a run ensemble. The
theory behind NB4 is that the damage on gear teeth will cause
transient load fluctuation that is different from that caused by
normal teeth, and that this can be seen in the envelope of the
signal.
(10) Energy ratio (ER)
vffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
u1 Pn
u ðdi Þ2
ER ¼ tn1 Pi¼1 n 0 2
n i¼1 ðdi Þ
where di is the ith measurement of the difference signal, and di
is the ith measurement of the regular meshing components,
which include the shaft frequencies and their harmonics, the
meshing frequencies and their harmonics, and all first-order
sidebands. ER is defined as the ratio of the root mean squares
between the difference signal and the signal containing only
regular meshing components.
(11) Energy operator (EOP)
P posed frequency-band signal bi;j is produced, where bi;j denotes
n ni¼1 ðrei  reÞ4
EOP ¼  2
Pn 2 the number of decomposed frequency-band signals and equals
i¼1 ðrei  reÞ
where rei equals x2i  xi1 xiþ1 and is the ith measurement of the
resulting signal re, and re is the average of the resulting signal.
EOP is developed by first calculating the value x2i  xi1 xiþ1 for
every point xi ði ¼ 1; 2; . . . ; nÞ of the signal. The energy operator
is then computed by taking the kurtosis of the resulting signal.
2.2. Frequency-domain feature extraction
Four frequency-domain feature parameters are extracted from
the frequency spectrum of a gear vibration signal in this work.
These frequency-domain parameters may contain information that
is not present in the time-domain feature parameters. They are de-
fined as follows (Lei et al., 2007).
(1) Mean frequency (MF)
1X K
MF ¼ Xk
K k¼1
where X k is the kth measurement of the frequency spectrum of
signal x and Kis the total number of spectrum lines.
1421
(2) Frequency center (FC)
PK
fk X k
FC ¼ Pk¼1
K
ð13Þ
k¼1 X k
where fk is the frequency value of the kth spectrum line and X k
is the kth measurement of the frequency spectrum.
(3) Root mean square frequency (RMSF)
vffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
uPK 2
u fk X k
RMSF ¼ t Pk¼1 K
ð14Þ
k¼1 X k
(4) Standard deviation frequency (STDF)
ð9Þ sP
ffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
K 2
k¼1 ðfk  FCÞ X k
STDF ¼ PK ð15Þ
k¼1 X k
MF indicates the vibration energy in the frequency domain. FC
and RMSF show the position changes of the main frequencies. STDF
describes the convergence degree of the spectrum power.
2.3. Time–frequency-domain feature extraction
In Sections 2.1 and 2.2, the time- and frequency-domain fea-
tures are extracted from the vibration signals, respectively. In order
to acquire additional characteristic information of gear damage,
advanced signal processing techniques are used. Here, two ad-
ð10Þ vanced signal processing techniques are employed to preprocess
the vibration signals.
0 Wavelet transform (WT) possesses good local property in both
time and frequency spaces (Peng & Chu, 2003). But the WT meth-
od does not split the high frequency bands where the modulation
information of machine fault exists. WPT furthers decomposition
of the high frequency bands and may generate a more precise fre-
quency-band partition over the whole analyzed frequency bands.
Thus, the frequency resolution may be enhanced (Fan & Zuo,
2006).
A vibration signal x is decomposed by WPT, and the decom-
the jth frequency-band signal at level i ðj ¼ 1; 2; . . . ; J, where J is
ð11Þ
2I ; i ¼ 1; 2; . . . ; I, where I is the number of decomposition levels).
The WPT decomposition process of x is shown in Fig. 1a. In this fig-
ure,fN is the upper limit of the frequency covered by x.
Empirical mode decomposition (EMD) (Huang, Shen, & Long,
1998) is able to decompose a signal into a set of complete and al-
most orthogonal components named intrinsic mode functions
(IMFs). An IMF is a function that satisfies the following two condi-
tions: (1) in the whole data set, the number of extrema and the
number of zero-crossings must either equal or differ at most by
one, and (2) at any point, the mean value of the envelope defined
by local maxima and the envelope defined by the local minima is
zero. IMFs represent simple oscillatory modes imbedded in the sig-
nal. The EMD process of the signal x is depicted in Fig. 1b.
At the end of the EMD decomposition we have a residue rL and a
collection of L IMFs cl ðl ¼ 1; 2; . . . ; LÞ. Summing up all IMFs and the
final residuer L , we obtain
X
L
x¼ cl þ rL : ð16Þ
ð12Þ l¼1
Thus, we can achieve a decomposition of the original signal into L
IMFs and a residue r L . The IMFs c1 ; c2 ; . . . ; cL include different
frequency bands ranging from high to low. The frequency
1422 Y. Lei et al. / Expert Systems with Applications 37 (2010) 1419–1430

x (0–fN) x

b1,1 (0–fN/2) b1,2 (fN/2–fN) r1 c1

b2,1 b2,2 b2,3 b2,4

(0–fN/4) (fN/4–fN/2) (fN/2–3fN/4) (3fN/4–fN)
r2 c2
…
…… ……

bI ,1 bI , J rL c L
(0–fN/2I) ((2I-1)fN/2I–fN)
(a) (b)
Fig. 1. Signal decomposition: (a) WPT and (b) EMD.

components contained in each IMF are different and they change
with the variation of signal x, while r L represents the central ten-
dency of signal x.
Making a comparison between WPT and EMD, we note that
WPT decomposes a signal into independent frequency bands with
equal frequency widths and without overlap or gap such that they
do not have redundant or omitted information. However, WPT has
the shortcoming that the analysis depends on the choice of the
wavelet basis function. The number of frequency bands can be eas-
ily controlled in WPT through setting the decomposition level. On
the other hand, EMD is based on the local characteristic time scales
imbedded in the signal and may decompose the signal into a set of
complete and almost orthogonal IMFs. During the decomposition,
there is no need for a basis function and both the number of IMFs
and the actual scaling are determined by the signal itself. Thus, it is
a self-adaptive signal processing method. However, also because of
the self-adaptive characteristic of EMD, the number of IMFs can not
be controlled beforehand. Thus, WPT and EMD process the signal
from different views and have their own characteristics including
advantages as well as shortcomings. This is the reason that we
adopt both of them to preprocess the gear vibration signals in this
work.
While a gear with damage is running, the energy of the fault
vibration signal changes depending whether the damaged tooth
is in meshing or not. This change can be demonstrated by calculat-
ing the energy entropies of the frequency-band signals of WPT and
IMFs of EMD. It can also be illustrated by directly observing the en-
ergy distributions of the frequency-band signals of WPT and IMFs
of EMD.
Fig. 2 shows the vibration waveforms of normal and damaged
gears, the decomposed frequency-band signals of WPT via db10,
and the energy distributions when the decomposition level of
WPT is 3. Fig. 3 shows the results when EMD is conducted. Because
the first six IMFs have captured almost all energy, other IMFs and
residual are omitted. From the energy distributions of WPT and
EMD, we can find that they are clearly different between the nor-
mal gear and the damaged one. Moreover, the energy entropies
calculated through Eq. (17) are shown in Table 1. It is seen that
the entropy of the damaged gear is different from that of the nor-
mal one for both WPT and EMD. The energy entropy used here is
defined as
X
J
He ¼  pj log pj ð17Þ
j¼1
where pj ¼ Ej =E is the percentage of energy of the jth frequency-
band signal of WPT or the jth IMF of EMD in the whole signal energy
P
E, where E ¼ Jj¼1 Ej .

0.2 0.2
Original

0 0
signal

-0.2 -0.2
0 1000 2000 3000 4000 0 1000 2000 3000 4000
0.2 0.2
Frequency-band

0 0
signals

-0.2 -0.2
0 512 1024 1536 2048 2560 3072 3584 4096 0 512 1024 1536 2048 2560 3072 3584 4096
1 1
Energy

0.5 0.5

0 0
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
(a ) (b )
Fig. 2. WPT decomposition results and energy distribution: (a) normal gear and (b) damaged gear.
 Y. Lei et al. / Expert Systems with Applications 37 (2010) 1419–1430 1423

0.2 0.2

Original 0 0
signal
-0.2 -0.2
0 1000 2000 3000 4000 0 1000 2000 3000 4000

0.2 0.2
IMFs

0 0

-0.2 -0.2
0 0.4096 0.8192 1.2288 1.6384 2.048 2.4576 0 0.4096 0.8192 1.2288 1.6384 2.048 2.4576
4 4
1 x 10 1 x 10
Energy

0.5 0.5

0 0
1 2 3 4 5 6 1 2 3 4 5 6
(a ) (b )
Fig. 3. EMD decomposition results and energy distribution: (a) normal gear and (b) damaged gear.

The training of an MLP network involves finding values of the

Table 1
WPT and EMD energy entropies of the vibration signals of the normal and damaged connection weights, which minimize an error function between
gears. the actual network outputs and the corresponding target output
values in the training set. One of the widely used error functions
Method Normal gear Damaged gear
is the mean square error and the most commonly used training
WPT 1.70 1.74
algorithms are based on back-propagation.
EMD 1.06 1.30

3.2. RBF network

Based on the above analysis, we can see that the energy distri-
bution of either the frequency-band signals of WPT or the IMFs of
EMD will change when the gear conditions change. Thus, the ener-
gies of the frequency-band signals and the IMFs can be used as
additional time–frequency-domain features for gear damage
detection. According to the signal characteristics of the gear exper-
iments in this paper, db10 wavelet is used, the decomposition level
of WPT is chosen to be 3, and the first six IMFs decomposed by
EMD are considered. Thus, 14 energy features are extracted here.
3. Brief review of the MLP neural network, the RBF neural
network, and the KNN classification algorithm
Artificial neural networks have been developed in the form of
parallel distributed network models based on biological learning
process of the human brain. Among different types of ANNs,
feed-forward multi-layer perceptron (MLP) neural network and ra-
dial basis function (RBF) neural network are widely used by
researchers (Haykin, 1999; Wasserman, 1995).
3.1. MLP network
MLP network consists of an input layer of source nodes, one or
more hidden layers of computation nodes, and an output layer. The
commonly used structure of the MLP neural network consists of
three layers: input, hidden and output. The numbers of nodes in
the input and the output layers depend on the numbers of input
features and output classes, respectively. The number of hidden
nodes is determined using the geometric pyramid rule shown in
the following equation (Hansen, 1998; Yang, Stronach, & MacCon-
nell, 2002). The sigmoid function is employed as the active func-
tion of the hidden nodes
pffiffiffiffiffiffiffi
h¼ mn
where h; m and n are the numbers of nodes in the hidden, input and
output layers, respectively.
The structure of an RBF network is similar to that of an MLP.
But the activation function of the hidden layer is different from
that of the MLP and the Gaussian function defined below is used
here:
!
ðx  cÞ2
f ðxÞ ¼ exp  2
ð19Þ
2b
where b and c are the width and center of the Gaussian function,
respectively. The outputs of the hidden nodes give a measure
of the distance between the input features and the center c of
the data cluster. The parameter b represents the radius of the
hypersphere.
There are two steps in the training of the RBF network. First,
depending on the information contained in the input samples,
the nodes in the hidden layer and the center and the width of
the Gaussian function are determined. In the second step, accord-
ing to the parameters in the hidden layer, input samples, and the
target values, the weights between the hidden and the output lay-
ers are determined and adjusted by the principle of least squares
minimization.
3.3. KNN algorithm
When D features are extracted from a sample with n data
points, in the KNN classification algorithm, each training sample
is represented in a D-dimensional space according to the value
of each of its D input features. The testing sample is then repre-
sented in the same space, and its K nearest neighbors are se-
lected. The class of each of these K neighbors is then tallied,
and the class with the largest number of ‘‘votes” is selected as
the classification of the testing sample (Duda & Hart, 1973;
Hu, Yu, & Xie, 2008). The K nearest neighbors are usually deter-
mined by computing the Euclidean distance between the testing
ð18Þ
sample and each of the training samples. The Euclidean distance
between the testing sample TEd and the mth training sample
TRm;d is defined as:
1424 Y. Lei et al. / Expert Systems with Applications 37 (2010) 1419–1430
" #1=2
XD
Dm ¼ ðTEd  TRm;d Þ2 ; RBF and KNN, and utilizing the input features extracted from the
d¼1
d ¼ 1; 2; . . . ; D; m ¼ 1; 2; . . . ; M
where D and M are the numbers of input features and training sam-
ples, respectively.
Determining the neighborhood parameter K is a classical prob-
lem in the KNN classification algorithm. A commonly used rule of
thumb is thatpthe ffiffiffiffiffi maximum value of the neighborhood parameter
K is less than M (Ghosh, Chaudhuri, & Murthy, 2005; Pal, Bandyo-
padhyay, & Murthy, 1998). Because the choice of the neighborhood
parameter is not
ffi the research focus of this
pffiffiffiffi pffiffiffiffistudy,
ffi the K value is se-
lected as b M c in this paper, where
pffiffiffiffiffi b M c indicates the largest
integer less than or equal to M.
4. The multidimensional hybrid intelligent diagnosis method
Multiple classifier combination is a collection of several classifi-
ers whose individual decisions are combined in some way to clas-
sify testing examples. The idea of combining multiple classifiers in
a committee is based on the expectation that the committee can
outperform its members. The classifiers with different behaviors
will provide complementary information to the integrator. When
they are combined, performance improvement is usually achieved.
Thus, diversity between the classifiers is recognized to be one of
the desired characteristics required to achieve this improvement
(Aksela & Laaksonen, 2006; Sirlantzis, Hoque, & Fairhurst, 2008;
Zouari, Heutte, & Lecourtier, 2006). This diversity can be obtained
through using multidimensional feature sets and/or different clas-
sification principles. Therefore, if the classification results of multi-
ple classifiers using multidimensional feature sets and different
classification principles are fused by integration techniques, the fi-
nal recognition accuracy is expected to be higher than that of any
of the participating classifiers. Of the various integration tech-
niques proposed in the literature, the weighted combination
(weighted averaging technique) is the simplest and the most fre-
quently used, which is to assign a nonnegative weight to each indi-
vidual classifier.
From the description in Section 3, it can be seen that MLP,
RBF and KNN have different classification principles and exhibit
complementary classification performance. Additionally, the
three different feature sets are extracted from time-, frequency-
Hilbert
Transform
Difference and
residual signals
Gears with Data
FFT
accelerometers acquisition
WPT
EMD
Fig. 4. Flow chart of the proposed method.
and time–frequency domains, respectively. Thus, combining MLP,
three different domains, a multidimensional hybrid intelligent
ð20Þ diagnosis method is proposed to improve the identification accu-
racy of gear damage. The proposed method is shown in Fig. 4
and includes the following procedures. First, vibration signals
captured with accelerometers from gears are preprocessed with
Hilbert transform, and the difference and residual signals are ob-
tained. Then 11 time-domain features are extracted from the ori-
ginal, the difference, and the residual signals. Four frequency-
domain features are extracted from the frequency spectra of
the vibration signals. Additionally, WPT and EMD are adopted
to decompose the vibration signals, and the energy feature is ex-
tracted from each of the frequency-band signals of WPT and the
IMFs of EMD. By this point of time, the multidimensional fea-
tures have been extracted from all three domains. Second, with
the input features from each of the three domains, three differ-
ent classification algorithms, namely, MLP, RBF and KNN, are uti-
lized to recognize the gear conditions. We refer the nine
classifiers from top to bottom in Fig. 4 as classifiers 1–9. Finally,
the weighted averaging technique with GA is employed to com-
bine the outputs of the nine classifiers and come up with the fi-
nal diagnosis result of gear conditions.
The final diagnosis result is given as follows:
8
> P
9
> m ¼ 1; 2; . . . ; M0 ; c ¼ 1; 2; . . . ; 9
< ym ¼
> wc ym;c ;
c¼1
ð21Þ
>
> P
9
>
: wc ¼ 1; wc P 0
c¼1
where ym and ym;c represent the classification results of the mth
testing sample using the hybrid intelligent method and the cth sin-
gle classifier respectively, wc is the weight associated with the cth
single classifier, and M 0 is the number of the testing samples.
In this work, the weights are estimated using GA to optimize a
fitness function. Real-coded genomes are adopted and a population
size of 10 individuals is used starting with randomly generated
genomes. The maximum number of generations 100 is chosen as
the termination criterion for the solution process. Non-uniform-
mutation function and arithmetic crossover operator (Mich-
alewicz, 1999) are used with the mutation probability of 0.01
and the crossover probability of 0.8, respectively. The fitness func-
tion is defined as:
MLP
11 time-domain
RBF
features
KNN
MLP
4 frequency-domain Diagnosis
features RBF GA
result
KNN
MLP
14 time-frequency-
domain features RBF
KNN
 Y. Lei et al. / Expert Systems with Applications 37 (2010) 1419–1430
8 1
> f ¼ 1þE
< tr
 M 12
> P 2
: Etr ¼ M1 ðym  ym Þ ; m ¼ 1; 2; . . . ; M
m¼1
where Etr is the root mean square training errors, ym is the target of
the mth training sample, and M is the number of the training
samples.
5. Experimental setups and diagnosis results
In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method,
we conducted two experiments on a gearbox test rig. One is that
gears with a chipped tooth and a missing tooth were manufactured
and the gear vibration signals under normal condition, the two
damage conditions, and the combination of these two damage
modes were captured. The other is that the cracks with different
levels were created at the tooth root of a gear. The data were used
to test the diagnosis performance of the proposed method to the
early crack.
5.1. Category identification of gear damage
5.1.1. Experimental setup and data acquisition
Fig. 5a shows the experimental system of the test rig used in
this paper and its system diagram is displayed in Fig. 5b. The sys-
tem includes a gearbox, a 3-hp ac motor for driving the gearbox,
and a magnetic brake for loading. The motor rotating speed is
controlled by a speed controller, which allows the tested gear
to operate under various speeds. The load is provided by the mag-
netic brake connected to the output shaft and the torque can be
adjusted by a brake controller. As shown in Fig. 5b, the gearbox
is driven by the motor and there are three shafts inside the gear-
box, which are mounted to the gearbox housing by rolling ele-
ment bearings. Gear 1 (#1) on shaft 1 has 16 teeth and meshes
with gear 2 (#2) with 48 teeth. Gear 3 (#3) on shaft 2 has 40
teeth and meshes with gear 4 (#4), which is on the output shaft
(shaft 3) and has 24 teeth. Gears 10 (#10 ) and 40 (#40 ) are the
tested gears. #10 is the same as #1 but it has a chipped tooth.
#40 is the same as #4 but it has a missing tooth. #10 and #40
are shown in Fig. 6.
The vibration was measured using accelerometers under each of
the following gear conditions: (a) all gears were normal, (b) #1 was
replaced with #10 , (c) #4 was replaced with #40 , and (d) both #1
and #4 were replaced by #10 and #40 , respectively. A DSP Siglab
analyzer 20-42 and a laptop with the data acquisition software
were used to collect the vibration data. The speed of the driving
motor and the load of the magnetic brake were varied to simulate
the general operating conditions. The vibration data were acquired
under three different loads and five different motor speeds from
Siglab analyzer
Gearbox system
Laptop
Speed controller
Accelerometers
(a)
Fig. 5. (a) Experimental system and (b) diagram of the system.
1425
ð22Þ
Fig. 6. Gears with a chipped tooth and a missing tooth.
1200 to 2400 r/min with an increment of 300 r/min. Among the
three different loads, one was no torque generated by the brake
and the other two had different torques. The sampling frequency
was 5120 Hz and the number of data points in each sample was
4096. Under an identical operating condition, four data samples
were collected. Therefore, 60 data samples were obtained for each
gear condition and there were altogether 240 data samples for the
four gear conditions. Fig. 7 gives a vibration waveform collected
under each of the four gear conditions.
5.1.2. Diagnosis results
As mentioned above, under the same gearbox operating condi-
tion (identical motor speed, load and fault mode), four data sam-
ples were collected. For each of the four gear conditions, 60
samples were acquired, and therefore the whole data set corre-
sponding to the four gear conditions includes altogether 240 sam-
ples. One hundred and twenty data samples were selected for
training and the remaining 120 samples were used to test. This is
a four-class classification task corresponding to the four different
gear conditions. The proposed multidimensional hybrid intelligent
diagnosis method is applied to identifying the categories of the
gear damage. In order to know how well the proposed hybrid intel-
ligent method based on multiple classifier combination works, we
also tested the performance of the nine individual classifiers. The
identification accuracies of the proposed method and the individ-
ual classifiers are shown in Fig. 8 and Table 2. We refer this exper-
iment as Experiment #1 in Table 2.
Examining the results in Fig. 8 and Table 2, it can be seen that
the testing accuracy range of the nine individual classifiers is from
71.67% to 88.33% and the average of these accuracies is 80.37%. But
with the proposed method, the identification accuracy is enhanced
to 98.33%. The amount of improvement is quite large.
Gearbox
Motor
#1 #1’ Shaft 1 Brake controller
#2 Shaft 2 #3
Brake
Shaft 3 #4 #4’
(b)
1426 Y. Lei et al. / Expert Systems with Applications 37 (2010) 1419–1430

0.1
0 (a)
-0.1
0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8
0.1

Amplitude (v)
0 (b)
-0.1
0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8
0.1
0 (c)
-0.1
0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8
0.1
0 (d)
-0.1
0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8
Time (s)
Fig. 7. Original waveforms of gears: (a) normal, (b) chipped tooth, (c) missing tooth, and (d) chipped tooth and missing tooth.

100
Testing accuracy %

90

80

70

60

50

The proposed
Classifier 1

Classifier 2

Classifier 3

Classifier 4

Classifier 5

Classifier 6

Classifier 8

Classifier 9
Classifier7

method

Fig. 8. Accuracy comparison of the nine individual classifiers and the proposed method for Experiment #1.

Table 2
Accuracy comparison between individual classifiers and the multidimensional hybrid intelligent method.

Experiment Data Classifier Classifier Classifier Classifier Classifier Classifier Classifier Classifier Classifier Average of the nine The proposed
set 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 classifiers method
#1 – 73.33 71.67 87.50 72.50 85.00 88.33 80.83 75.83 88.33 80.37 98.33
#2 A 95.56 100.00 100.00 92.22 100.00 100.00 96.67 100.00 100.00 98.27 100.00
B 83.33 84.72 90.28 61.11 81.94 87.50 86.11 76.39 83.33 81.63 100.00
C 61.67 60.00 75.00 85.00 68.33 55.00 61.67 80.00 50.00 66.30 98.33

5.2. Level identification of gear cracks gears with different crack levels are summarized in Table 3. Three
gears with different conditions (F0–F2) including one normal gear
5.2.1. Experimental setup and data acquisition and two faulty gears were tested in the experiment. For gear con-
In order to enhance the torque generated by the gearbox test dition F1, there was a very small crack at a tooth root and we de-
rig, a timing belt was added between the motor and the gearbox. fined it as an early crack. For condition F2, there was a bigger crack
In addition, the configuration of the gearbox system was modified at a tooth root but not serious, and therefore we defined it as a
and Fig. 9 is the modified system diagram. From the figure, it can developing crack.
be seen that the gearbox is driven by the motor through a timing These faulty gears are shown in Fig. 11.
belt. Gears 1–4 (#1–#4) have 48, 16, 24 and 40 teeth, respectively. The vibration was measured for each of the three gears using
Gear 3 is the tested gear. the same data acquisition system. The vibration data were ac-
For detecting and identifying an early crack, crack faults were quired under three different loads and five different motor speeds
simulated and the crack sizes of small proportions were created from 1200 to 2000 r/min with an increment of 200 r/min. Among
in the gearbox experiment. Let a be the crack angle, a one half of the three different loads, one was no torque generated by the brake
the chordal tooth thickness, and b the face width, which are shown and the other two had different torques. They were labeled as loads
in Fig. 10. Because the thinnest knife of the machine tools in our lab 0, 1 and 2, respectively. The sampling frequency was 5120 Hz and
is 0.4 mm, the crack thickness is 0.4 mm in the experiment. The the number of data points in each sample was 4096. Four data
 Y. Lei et al. / Expert Systems with Applications 37 (2010) 1419–1430 1427

Gearbox
Timing belt
Speed controller #1 Shaft 1 Brake controller

#2 Shaft 2 #3
Motor
Brake
Shaft 3 #4

Fig. 9. Diagram of the modified system.

Fig. 11. Gears with different level cracks.

samples were collected under an identical operating condition and
there are 180 data samples for these three levels of gear cracks.
Fig. 12 shows sample vibration waveform of the normal and
cracked gears. The data collected here were labeled as Experiment
#2 (shown in Table 2).
5.2.2. Diagnosis results
We conducted three investigations on three different data sub-
sets (A–C) from the whole gear data collected from experiment #2
as labeled in Table 2. The detailed descriptions of the three data
sets are shown in Table 4. For the first investigation on data set
A, the organization of the training and testing samples is similar
to that of Experiment #1 as described in Section 5.1.2. The acquired
180 data samples were divided into 90 training and 90 testing
instances.
The nine individual classifiers and the multidimensional hybrid
intelligent method were used to recognize the three levels of the
gear cracks. Fig. 13 and Table 2 give their diagnosis results. Since
this classification problem is relatively simple, six individual clas-
sifiers and the proposed method all achieve the highest possible
classification correct rate (100%). However, there are still three
individual classifiers failing to produce the ideal identification
results.
Another investigation was performed using data set B. In this
investigation, the training and testing samples are reorganized as
depicted in Table 4. The 108 training samples were collected under
the lower motor speeds 1200, 1400 and 1600 r/min, while the 72
testing samples were collected under the higher motor speeds
1800 and 2000 r/min. The investigation for these training and test-
ing samples is carried out to further clarify the robustness of the
proposed method with various motor speeds.
The testing results for the individual classifiers and the pro-
posed method are shown in Fig. 14 and Table 2, respectively. From
Fig. 14 and Table 2, we can see that the proposed multidimensional
hybrid intelligent method produces the highest classification cor-
rect rate, which is still 100%. However, the highest correct rate of
the nine individual classifiers is 90.28%. The accuracies of the nine
individual classifies range from 61.11% to 90.28% and the average
accuracy is 81.63%. Compared with the average accuracy, the pro-
posed method increases the recognition accuracy by 18.37%.
Further, we performed another investigation on data set C. The
training and testing samples are described in Table 4. The data col-
lected under the gear with a developing crack (F2) were selected as
the training samples and the data of an early crack (F1) as the test-
ing samples. The purpose of this investigation is to assess the gen-
eralization ability of the proposed method to an early damage
when it is trained by developing damage samples.
The multidimensional hybrid intelligent method and individual
classifiers are employed again and the corresponding identification
results are given in Fig. 15 and Table 2. It is observed from the re-
sults that the identification accuracy (98.33%) achieved by the pro-
posed method is much higher than that of any individual classifier.
For the individual classifiers, the accuracies ranged from 50.00% to
85.00% with an average accuracy of 66.30%.
6. Discussions
(1) In the above two experiments, Experiment #1 uses the data
collected from the normal gear, and damaged gears with a
chipped tooth, a missing tooth and combination of a
chipped and a missing teeth, to train and test the proposed

Face width, b

Crack Crack angleα

Chordal tooth thickness, 2a

Fig. 10. Crack angle, face width and chordal tooth thickness of a gear.

Table 3
Geometry of the crack faults.

Crack fault mode Geometry of fault

Depth (mm) Width (mm) Thickness (mm) Crack angle
F0 0 0 0 –
F1 ð1=4Þa ð1=4Þb 0.4 45°
F2 ð1=2Þa ð1=2Þb 0.4 45°
1428 Y. Lei et al. / Expert Systems with Applications 37 (2010) 1419–1430

0.1
0
-0.1
0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8
0.1
0

-0.1
0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8
0.1
0

-0.1
0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 0.8

Fig. 12. Original waveforms of gears: (a) F0, (b) F1, and (c) F2.

Table 4
Description of three data sets.

Data Number of training/testing Fault modes of training/ Motor speeds of training/testing samples Loads of training/testing Label of
set samples testing (r/min) samples classification
A 30/30 F0/F0 1200–2000/1200–2000 0, 1, 2/0, 1, 2 1
30/30 F1/F1 1200–2000/1200–2000 0, 1, 2/0, 1, 2 2
30/30 F2/F2 1200–2000/1200–2000 0, 1, 2/0, 1, 2 3
B 36/24 F0/F0 1200–1600/1800, 2000 0, 1, 2/0, 1, 2 1
36/24 F1/F1 1200–1600/1800, 2000 0, 1, 2/0, 1, 2 2
36/24 F2/F2 1200–1600/1800, 2000 0, 1, 2/0, 1, 2 3
C 30/30 F0/F0 1200–2000/1200–2000 0, 1, 2/0, 1, 2 1
30/30 F2/F1 1200–2000/1200–2000 0, 1, 2/0, 1, 2 2

100
Testing accuracy %

90

80

70

60

50
The proposed
Classifier 1

Classifier 2

Classifier 3

Classifier 4

Classifier 5

Classifier 6

Classifier 8

Classifier 9
Classifier7

method

Fig. 13. Accuracy comparison between the nine individual classifiers and the proposed method for data set A.

100
Testing accuracy %

90

80

70

60

50
The proposed
Classifier 1

Classifier 2

Classifier 3

Classifier 4

Classifier 5

Classifier 6

Classifier 8

Classifier 9
Classifier7

method

Fig. 14. Accuracy comparison between the nine individual classifiers and the proposed method for data set B.
 Y. Lei et al. / Expert Systems with Applications 37 (2010) 1419–1430 1429

100

Testing accuracy %
80

60

40

The proposed
Classifier 1

Classifier 2

Classifier 3

Classifier 4

Classifier 5

Classifier 6

Classifier 8

Classifier 9
Classifier7

method
Fig. 15. Accuracy comparison between the nine individual classifiers and the proposed method for data set C.

multidimensional hybrid intelligent method. In Experiment (4) The problems studied in the two experiments cover single
#2, three investigations on three different data subsets were fault diagnosis (a chipped tooth and a missing tooth), com-
performed. The first investigation adopts the data of the nor- bined fault diagnosis (combination of chipped and missing
mal gear and the damaged gear with different crack levels to teeth), and early fault diagnosis (early crack). Additionally,
train and test the proposed method. The second investiga- the vibration data were collected under the various operat-
tion utilizes the data collected under the lower motor speeds ing loads and motor speeds. Thus, they are typical gear fault
of the normal and the damaged gears to train, and the data diagnosis cases. The satisfactory experiment results demon-
collected under the higher motor speeds to test the proposed strate the effectiveness and generalization ability of the pro-
method. The third investigation employs the data of a devel- posed method.
oping crack to train and the data of an early crack to test.
Analyzing the two experiment results, it is found that only 7. Conclusion
in the first investigation of Experiment #2, six of the nine
individual classifiers achieved the same high diagnosis accu- A new multidimensional hybrid intelligent method using differ-
racies as the proposed method since it is a simple classifica- ent domain features and multiple classifier combination is pro-
tion problem. For all other results, the proposed method posed for gear damage identification in this paper. In order to
obtains the best results in the gear fault diagnosis. It derive more fault information, Hilbert transform, wavelet packet
improves the classification accuracies by 17.96%, 18.37% transform, and empirical mode decomposition are performed on
and 32.03% respectively in comparison with the average gear vibration signals. Multidimensional features from the time,
accuracies of the individual classifiers. For the second inves- the frequency, and the time–frequency domains are extracted to
tigation of Experiment #2, the highest accuracy yielded by reflect the gear health conditions from different aspects. The clas-
the proposed method implies that it has better robustness sifiers based on multi-layer perceptron (MLP) neural network, ra-
under various motor speeds than the individual classifiers. dial basis function (RBF) neural network, and K nearest neighbor
In addition, the diagnosis results of the third investigation (KNN) classification algorithm are combined with GA to construct
of Experiment #2 demonstrate that the generalization abil- a reliable and accurate fault diagnosis method.
ity of the proposed method is superior to those of the indi- The gear experiments with different gear damage categories
vidual classifiers in gear early fault diagnosis. and levels were conducted on a lab gearbox. The data were col-
(2) All the above analysis results prove that the proposed multi- lected from the gears under different loads and motor speeds.
dimensional hybrid intelligent method obtains significant The analysis results on the gear data show that the proposed hy-
achievements in recognition accuracy and provides better brid intelligent method enables the detection of abnormalities in
generalization ability compared to the individual classifiers. gears and at the same time the identification of the categories
It can identify not only the different fault categories but also and levels of gear damage.
the different fault levels better. The success obtained by the
proposed method may be attributed to the following three Acknowledgement
points. (1) Preprocessing with Hilbert transform, WPT, and
EMD mines more fault characteristic information from the This research was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engi-
gear vibration signals. (2) Extracting multidimensional fea- neering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).
ture sets including time-domain, frequency-domain as well
as time–frequency-domain features better reflects the gear References
health conditions. (3) Adopting the weighted averaging
technique based on GA to combine the complementary clas- Abumahfouz, I. A. (2005). A comparative study of three artificial neural networks for
the detection and classification of gear faults. International Journal of General
sifiers raises diagnosis accuracy.
Systems, 34, 261–277.
(3) Observing the identification accuracies of the nine individual Aksela, M., & Laaksonen, J. (2006). Using diversity of errors for selecting members of
classifiers in the two experiments, it can be seen that the a committee classifier. Pattern Recognition, 39, 608–623.
individual classifiers using the time–frequency-domain fea- Bi, Y., Guan, J., & Bell, D. (2008). The combination of multiple classifiers using an
evidential reasoning approach. Artificial Intelligence, 172, 1731–1751.
tures mostly gain better results than those using time- Decker, H. J. (2003). Effects on diagnostic parameters after removing additional
domain or frequency-domain features. This is reasonable synchronous gear meshes. Technical Report NASA TM-2003-212312, ARL-TR-
because the time–frequency domain provides more infor- 2933, NASA and the US Army Research Laboratory, April 2003.
Decker, H. J., & Lewicki D.G. (2003). Spiral bevel pinion crack detection in a
mation than either the time domain or the frequency helicopter gearbox. In Proceedings of the american helicopter society 59th annual
domain alone. forum, Phoenix, AZ (pp. 1222–1232).
1430 Y. Lei et al. / Expert Systems with Applications 37 (2010) 1419–1430
Duda, R. O., & Hart, P. E. (1973). Pattern classification and scene analysis. New York:
Wiley.
Fan, X. F., & Zuo, M. J. (2006). Gearbox fault detection using Hilbert and wavelet
packet transform. Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing, 20, 966–982.
Fumera, G., & Roli, F. (2005). A theoretical and experimental analysis of linear
combiners for multiple classifier systems. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis
and Machine Intelligence, 27, 942–956.
Ghosh, A. K., Chaudhuri, P., & Murthy, C. A. (2005). On visualization and aggregation
of nearest neighbor classifiers. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine
Intelligence, 27, 1592–1602.
Halima, E. B., Shoukat Choudhury, M. A. A., Shah, S. L., & Zuo, M. J. (2008). Time
domain averaging across all scales: A novel method for detection of gearbox
faults. Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing, 22, 261–278.
Hansen, J. V. (1998). Comparative performance of backpropagation networks
designed by genetic algorithms and heuristics. International Journal of
Intelligent Systems in Accounting Finance and Management, 7, 69–79.
Haykin, S. (1999). Neural networks: A comprehensive foundation (2nd ed.). NJ, USA:
Prentice Hall.
Huang, N. E., Shen, Z., & Long, S. R. (1998). The Empirical mode decomposition and
the Hilbert spectrum for nonlinear and non-stationary time series analysis.
Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 454, 903–995.
Huenupán, F., Yoma, N. B., & Molina, C. (2008). Confidence based multiple
classifier fusion in speaker verification. Pattern Recognition Letters, 29,
957–966.
Hu, Q., Yu, D., & Xie, Z. (2008). Neighborhood classifiers. Expert Systems with
Applications, 34, 866–876.
Jafarizadeh, M. A., Hassannejad, R., Ettefagh, M. M., & Chitsaz, S. (2008).
Asynchronous input gear damage diagnosis using time averaging and wavelet
filtering. Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing, 22, 172–201.
Kittler, J., Hatef, M., Duin, R. P. W., & Matas, J. (1998). On combining classifiers. IEEE
Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 20, 226–239.
Lei, Y. G., He, Z. J., Zi, Y. Y., & Hu, Q. (2007). Fault diagnosis of rotating machinery
based on multiple ANFIS combination with GAs. Mechanical Systems and Signal
Processing, 21, 2280–2294.
Lei, Y. G., He, Z. J., & Zi, Y. Y. (2008). A new approach to intelligent fault diagnosis of
rotating machinery. Expert Systems with Applications, 35, 1593–1600.
Lei, Y. G., He, Z. J., Zi, Y. Y., & Chen, X. F. (2008). New clustering algorithm-based fault
diagnosis using compensation distance evaluation technique. Mechanical
Systems and Signal Processing, 22, 419–435.
Loutridis, S. J. (2008). Gear failure prediction using multiscale local statistics.
Engineering Structures, 30, 1214–1223.
Loutridis, S. J. (2008). Self-similarity in vibration time series: Application to gear
fault diagnostics. Transactions of the ASME: Journal of Vibration and Acoustics,
130, 0310041–0310049.
Michalewicz, Z. (1999). Genetic algorithms + data structures = evolution programs
(3rd ed.). NY, USA: Springer.
Pal, S. K., Bandyopadhyay, S., & Murthy, C. A. (1998). Genetic algorithms for
generation of class boundaries. IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, Cybernetics,
28, 816–828.
Peng, Z. K., & Chu, F. L. (2003). Application of wavelet transform in machine
condition monitoring and fault diagnostics: A review with bibliography.
Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing, 17, 199–221.
Rafiee, J., Arvani, F., Harifi, A., & Sadeghi, M. H. (2007). Intelligent condition
monitoring of a gearbox using artificial neural network. Mechanical Systems and
Signal Processing, 21, 1746–1754.
Rasheed, S., Stashuk, D., & Kamel, M. (2008). Fusion of multiple classifiers for motor
unit potential sorting. Biomedical Signal Processing and Control, 3, 229–243.
Samanta, B. (2004). Gear fault detection using artificial neural networks and
support vector machines with genetic algorithms. Mechanical Systems and Signal
Processing, 18, 625–644.
Samuel, P. D., & Pines, D. J. (2005). A review of vibration-based techniques for
helicopter transmission diagnostics. Journal of Sound and Vibration, 282,
475–508.
Sirlantzis, K., Hoque, S., & Fairhurst, M. C. (2008). Diversity in multiple classifier
ensembles based on binary feature quantisation with application to face
recognition. Applied Soft Computing, 8, 437–445.
Wasserman, P. D. (1995). Advanced methods in neural computing. New York, USA:
Van Nostrand Reinhold.
Yang, D. M., Stronach, A. F., & MacConnell, P. (2002). Third-order spectral techniques
for the diagnosis of motor bearing condition using artificial neural networks.
Mechanical Systems and Signal Processing, 16, 391–411.
Zio, E., Baraldi, P., & Gola, G. (2008). Feature-based classifier ensembles for
diagnosing multiple faults in rotating machinery. Applied Soft Computing, 8,
1365–1380.
Zouari, H., Heutte, L., & Lecourtier, Y. (2006). Controlling the diversity in classifier
ensembles though a measure of agreement. Pattern Recognition, 39, 2195–2199.
Zuo, M. J., Li, W., & Fan, X. F. (2005). Statistical methods for low speed planetary
gearbox monitoring (12 pp.). Technical Report, Department of Mechanical
Engineering, University of Alberta, Edmonton, November 29, 2005.
Zuo, M. J., Lin, J., & Fan, X. F. (2005). Feature separation using ICA for a one-
dimensional time series and its application in fault detection. Journal of Sound
and Vibration, 287, 614–624.