An End-to-end Deep Clustering Method with Consistency and Complementarity Attention Mechanism for Multisensor Fault Diagnosis

Deep clustering methods have found successful applications in single-sensor data fault diagnosis. However, most of these methods employ separate optimization strategies that overlook the interaction between feature learning and clustering. Moreover, conventional deep learning methods for fault diagnosis often disregard the consistent and complementary information inherent in the multisensor data, resulting in unsatisfactory multisensor fault diagnosis performance. In this study, we introduce a novel End-to-end Deep Clustering Method with Consistency and Complementarity Attention Mechanism, termed EDCM-CCAM, tailored for multisensor fault diagnosis. Firstly, multiple deep autoencoder networks are utilized to concurrently extract the deep representation features from various sensor inputs. Secondly, we introduce a Consistency and Complementarity Attention Mechanism (CCAM) to facilitate multisensor feature fusion, accompanied by the design of two distinct loss functions to fully exploit the consistent and complementary information within multisensor data. Finally, fault pattern recognition in multisensor data is accomplished through Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence-based clustering, while a joint optimization strategy is employed to simultaneously optimize all components of the EDCM-CCAM. The efficacy of the proposed method is validated on a gearbox dataset, demonstrating superior performance in multisensor fault diagnosis compared to alternative methods.