Few-Shot Learning for Fault Diagnosis: Semi-Supervised Prototypical Network with Pseudo-Labels

Achieving deep learning-based bearing fault diagnosis heavily relies on large labeled training samples. However, in real industry applications, labeled data are scarce or even impossible to obtain. In this study, we addressed a challenging few-shot bearing fault diagnosis problem with few or no training labeled samples of novel categories. To tackle this problem, we considered a semi-supervised prototype network based on few-shot bearing fault diagnosis with pseudo-labels. The existing prototypical networks with pseudo-label methods train a pseudo label model to label unlabeled samples using high-dimensional labeled data, which cannot eliminate the instability of the pseudo-label model caused by dimensional labeled features. To mitigate this issue, we used kernel principal component analysis to reduce the dimensions of and remove redundant information from high-dimensional data. Specifically, we used the pseudo-label prediction algorithm with probability distance to label unlabeled samples, aiming to improve the labeling accuracy. We applied two well-known bearing data sets for the validation experiments with symmetry parameters. The findings illustrated that the classification accuracy of the proposed method is higher than that of other existing methods.