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PCA-Based Feature Selection Scheme for Machine Defect Classification

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 53, NO. 6, DECEMBER 2004
PCA-Based Feature Selection Scheme for Machine
Defect Classification
Arnaz Malhi, Student Member, IEEE, and Robert X. Gao, Senior Member, IEEE
Abstract—The sensitivity of various features that are character-
istic of a machine defect may vary considerably under different op-
erating conditions. Hence it is critical to devise a systematic feature
selection scheme that provides guidance on choosing the most rep-
resentative features for defect classification. This paper presents a
feature selection scheme based on the principal component anal-
ysis (PCA) method. The effectiveness of the scheme was verified
experimentally on a bearing test bed, using both supervised and
unsupervised defect classification approaches. The objective of the
study was to identify the severity level of bearing defects, where
no a priori knowledge on the defect conditions was available. The
proposed scheme has shown to provide more accurate defect clas-
sification with fewer feature inputs than using all features initially
considered relevant. The result confirms its utility as an effective
tool for machine health assessment.
Index Terms—Defect classification, feature selection, neural net-
works, principal component analysis (PCA).
I. INTRODUCTION
S ENSOR-BASED machine condition monitoring has gained
increasing attention from the research community world-
wide [1], [2]. The goal of machine condition monitoring is to ob-
tain operational status of the machines and use the information
to 1) identify potential machine faults and failure before they
occur, thus reducing unexpected and costly machine downtime,
and 2) better control the quality of products, which is closely re-
lated to the condition of the machine. The information gathered
from the monitoring sensors ultimately provides insight into the
manufacturing process itself, enabling effective high-level deci-
sion-making for quality production at a lower cost.
The application of neural networks to machine condition
monitoring has long been demonstrated. The development is
rooted in the need for automated “learning” capabilities of the
monitoring system to adapt to the machine or process being
monitored in-situ, in order to develop accurate functional rela-
tionships between the available inputs and desired output data
sets. In the area of condition monitoring of rolling bearings,
early studies have applied neural networks to the identification
of defect locations (e.g., on the inner or outer ring of the
bearing) [3]–[6]. While successful in demonstrating the classi-
ficatory ability of the neural networks, they did not fully utilize
their adaptive learning capabilities [3], [4]. Other techniques
Manuscript received June 15, 2003; revised May 31, 2004. This work was
supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants DMI-9624353 and
0218161.
The authors are with the Department of Mechanical and Industrial En-
gineering, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA 01003 USA (e-mail:
amalhi@partners.org; gao@ecs.umass.edu).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TIM.2004.834070
0018-9456/04$20.00 © 2004 IEEE
1517
such as autoregressive modeling have also been applied to
analyzing the spectra of defective bearings for classification
purpose [5]. It was found that feedforward neural networks
were generally more accurate than linear autoregressive models
and radial basis function networks to classify healthy and
defective bearings. More recently, wavelet transformation has
been demonstrated to provide feature inputs to a neural network
for the same goal [6].
In view of predicting the remaining service life of a ma-
chine, once a defect is identified, it is further important for
the monitoring system to provide an estimate of the defect’s
severity level. Such ability is of great relevance to the industry.
To achieve this goal, both feed-forward and recurrent networks
have been investigated for artificially induced defects [7].
Knowledge about the defect severity level is needed beforehand
in order to develop appropriate neural network model. However,
since bearings are generally installed in closed environment
and thus not readily accessible for defect condition inspection,
it is generally difficult to implement such models in an industry
setting.
Selecting the most representative features as inputs to the ma-
chine condition monitoring system presents another challenge.
Application of recurrent neural networks has been shown for
predicting future values of some time and frequency domain
parameters in monitoring a gearbox with defective bearings [8],
[9]. An adaptive technique without the use of neural networks
was developed, in which parameters of a defect propagation
model were updated based on the trend of the root mean square
(rms) of the vibration data [10]. In these studies, the accu-
racy of the diagnostic and, subsequently, prognostic models
depended on the sensitivity of the features used to estimate the
condition and propagation of the defects. Therefore, it is crit-
ical to devise a systematic scheme that is capable of selecting
the most representative features to maximize the accuracy of
classification schemes for defect severity evaluation. The prin-
cipal component analysis (PCA) technique, also known as the
Karhunen–Loeve transform, has been investigated before by
researchers for signal and image processing [11], [12]. Be-
cause of its ability to discriminate directions with the largest
variance in a data set, the suitability of PCA for identifying
the most representative features as inputs to a defect classi-
fication scheme is investigated in this paper. Two scenarios
were considered, with the objective to develop a systematic
approach to defect severity evaluation.
1) Supervised training, where the applicability of PCA to
select suitable features as inputs to feedforward neural
networks (FFNNs) and radial basis function (RBF) net-
works for defect classification was investigated.
1518 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 53, NO. 6, DECEMBER 2004

2) Unsupervised training, where the most sensitive features

computed from the vibration signals of defective bearings
were identified without a priori knowledge of the defect
conditions. These features were then used as inputs for
an unsupervised competitive learning scheme to classify
defective bearings according to their defect sizes.

II. CONTENDING FEATURES

The merit of a machine condition monitoring system rests
upon its ability to detect and classify a defect, estimate its
severity, and estimate the remaining service life of the machine Fig. 1. Bearing health diagnosis: typical system configuration.
based on the current operating conditions (Fig. 1). As an ex-
ample, rolling bearings have been widely used in the industry
to support rotating machines. Identifying the existence and
severity of a defective condition at the early stage will provide
valuable input to adjusting the maintenance schedule and mini-
mizing machine downtime. Techniques aimed at improving the
efficiency of data acquisition and processing to enable on-line
bearing condition monitoring have been investigated [13]. The
concept of feature selection for accurate defect classification is
a critical step toward realizing such an online bearing condition
monitoring platform.
Major time-domain statistical features considered for bearing
defect diagnosis and prognosis have included the rms, kurtosis,
rectified skew, and crest factor [9], [10], [14], [15]. Other features
investigated included the characteristic frequencies related to the
rotation of bearing components, e.g., the ball-pass frequency of
outer ring (BPFO), ball-pass frequency of inner ring (BPFI), and
ball-spin frequency (BSF) [16]. These features relate closely to
localized defects through the amplitudes at specific frequencies,
and thus do not provide a wholesome measure of the bearing
health status. Furthermore, it has been found that the time- and
frequency-domain features, when used alone, are of limited
effectiveness for detecting faults at the incipient stage, due to
their generally weak amplitudes and short duration [17]. In
comparison, features extracted by the wavelet transform have
shown to be more indicative of the defect status. Prior work
has successfully identified an inner ring defect of 0.25 mm
diameter using a combined wavelet and Fourier analysis [17].
As shown in Fig. 2(a), conventional spectral analysis could
Fig. 2. Spectral and spectral-wavelet analysis for inner race defect detection.
not identify the existence of the defect frequency (BPFI, at
58.6 Hz). By taking the wavelet transform of the bearing
signals and postprocessing it with the Fourier transform, the while based on the 13 initial features, is not limited to them only.
defect frequency could be successfully detected, as shown in Intuitively, it is difficult to estimate which features are more
Fig. 2(b). Since bearing defect identification is essentially based sensitive to defect development and propagation in a machine
on monitoring the amplitudes at characteristic frequencies, such system, as various factors affect the effectiveness of the features,
a combined approach enhances the performance of the defect e.g., location of the sensors, signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) of the
classification scheme. data acquisition system, etc. Therefore, a systematic approach
Leveraging the effectiveness of wavelet-based analysis, this to feature selection based on available data provides valuable
paper takes a multidomain approach by including the time-, guidance to the success of defect identification and severity
frequency-, and wavelet-domain features as inputs to a bearing evaluation. The utility of vibration data to classify faults and
defect classification scheme. An initial set of 13 features (Table I) their severity levels in other machinery components such as
was compiled, based on the published studies by various gears and cutting tools have been reported in [18] and [19].
researchers [3], [9], [10], [14]–[17]. It should be noted that Thus, the feature selection scheme presented in this paper
other features such as the peak amplitude in frequency-domain should be applicable to the monitoring of these components
[3] and sum of amplitudes of the sidebands [8] have also been as well, because of their similarity to problems associated with
investigated previously. The technique presented in this paper, the bearing condition monitoring.
MALHI AND GAO: PCA-BASED FEATURE SELECTION SCHEME FOR MACHINE DEFECT CLASSIFICATION 1519

TABLE I where is the statistical expectation operator applied

CONTENDING FEATURES FOR BEARING CONDITION MONITORING on the outer product of and its transpose. The representation
shown in (1) minimizes the error between the original and trans-
formed vectors. This is illustrated by considering the variance
of the principal components given by [23]

(3)

where represents the -by-1 vector .

It is evident that the variance of the principal components is a
function of the magnitude of the components of the vectors .
At the local maxima and minima for the variance function in
(3), the following relationship exists:

(4)

Equation (4) is satisfied [23] when

(5)
III. FEATURE SELECTION METHODLOGY
The PCA-based feature selection scheme for machine con- where is a scaling factor. This leads to
dition monitoring was based on the understanding that the am- (6)
plitude of vibration signals of defective machine components
increases as the severity of the defect increases [16]. The issue This equation can be recognized as an eigenvalue problem
of feature selection from a contending feature set arises, because with nontrivial solutions only when are the eigenvalues of
of the stochastic nature of the defect propagation in machinery the scatter matrix . Thus, the associated vectors (
[20]. Generally, as the defect severity increases, an overall in- to ) are the eigenvectors. If the condition is satisfied,
creasing vibration trend is superimposed by local variations of then the above representation also reduces the dimensionality
smaller magnitudes [9]. The goal of feature selection is therefore of the vectors. The error in representation of the original data
to select features that allow for an accurate description of the de- set due to the reduction in number of
fect condition, and subsequently, reliable defect classification, dimensions to is given by [23]
diagnosis, and prognosis. The PCA approach was developed to
reduce the dimensionality of the input features (13 initially) for
both supervised and unsupervised classification purposes. This (7)
is based on the consideration that a large number of inputs, while
increasing the computational load, do not necessarily contribute where are the eigenvalues of the scatter matrix corre-
to improving the effectiveness of defect classification. Prelimi- sponding to the eigenvectors . It is seen from (7) that using
nary study has shown [21] that some features may even provide the eigenvectors corresponding to the largest eigenvalues would
contradictory information and thus reduce the quality of data give the smallest error in representation. Thus, the variance is
analysis. maximum in the direction of the eigenvectors. Also, the variance
In general, the PCA technique transforms vectors in the directions of the eigenvectors de-
from a -dimensional space to creases in the same order when
vectors in a new, -dimensional space
as [22] (8)

Hence the features that have the largest variance due to a

(1) changing defect condition can be identified by examining their
directionality. This property of principal components has been
exploited for the presented feature selection study. Given that
where are the eigenvectors corresponding to the largest the features transformed by the principal components are not
eigenvalues for the scatter matrix and are the projections directly connected to the physical nature of the defect, the
of the original vectors on the eigenvectors . These projec- defect classification scheme presented in this study was based
tions are called the principal components of the original data set. on the original features themselves. The eigenvectors for the
Both and are positive integers, and the dimension cannot transformed data were only used to choose the most sensitive
be greater than . The -by- scatter matrix for the original features from the original feature set.
data set is defined as The effectiveness of the developed feature selection scheme
was investigated by means of numerical simulation. Four nor-
malized feature vectors , , , and were constructed
for to (2) with each of them forming clusters around four distinct levels
1520 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 53, NO. 6, DECEMBER 2004
Fig. 3. Simulated data for selecting features (f ;f ;f ;f ).
of magnitudes, as shown in Fig. 3(a)–(d). A total of 100 sam-
ples were considered for each of the four features; hence each
feature is a 100 1 vector. The four features were simulated to
have random variations from the same mean for each of the four
clusters. This is similar in principle to the variation of a vibration
data feature for four different defect sizes. Each of the four clus-
ters for each feature contained 25 data points. The four features
become less clearly differentiated from to , as overlap be-
tween the clusters increases. It is evident from Fig. 3 that a suit-
able feature selection scheme should be able to rank , , ,
and in the same order.
To derive the principal components for the simulated data set,
the four normalized features were arranged in a 4 100 matrix
(9)
The eigenvalues and the eigenvectors were calculated for the
scatter matrix . The matrix of eigenvectors can be represented
as , where to and to . The eigenvector
consists of four components from the fourth column of the
matrix . Similar arrangement applies to , , and . The
matrix is a 4 4 square matrix because of the presence of
the four features – . The eigenvector corresponding to the
eigenvalue with the largest magnitude was chosen. As shown
in Table II, one of the four eigenvalues of the data set is much
larger than the other three, indicating that most of the variance
is concentrated in one direction.
Table III lists the component magnitudes for the eigenvector
corresponding to the largest eigenvalue. Since this corresponds
to , the feature that is responsible for the maximum variance
in the data is readily identified. Subsequently, the magnitudes
of the four components of were examined. As shown in
Table III, . This result can be
interpreted in terms of the directionality of the eigenvector
in the original feature space. If the unit vectors for the original
feature space were represented as , , , and (where
, , etc.), then a
higher magnitude of denotes the similarity in direction
of the eigenvector with as compared to the other unit
vectors forming the basis for the original feature space. For the
presented simulated data, the component had the largest
magnitude, followed by , , and . Thus, the feature
represented along was the most sensitive, followed by those
along , , and . As a result, the presented selection
scheme was able to rank the four features – as desired.
Based on this study, the PCA approach was applied to selecting
most representative features extracted from the vibration data
measured in defective bearings, to improve the effectiveness
of defect identification.
IV. EXPERIMENTAL SETUP
To investigate the effectiveness of the proposed feature
selection scheme, experimental data were collected from both
healthy and defective bearings that contained seeded, localized
defects. Three cases were studied.
Case I: Defects were seeded in a deep groove ball
bearing (DGBB) of type 6220 [24], in the following three
configurations:
• inner ring defect (0.25 mm diameter);
• outer ring defect (0.25 mm diameter);
• defect in both the inner (3 mm diameter) and outer ring
(0.25 mm diameter).
The 13 features described before were extracted from the
vibration signals obtained from an accelerometer structurally
MALHI AND GAO: PCA-BASED FEATURE SELECTION SCHEME FOR MACHINE DEFECT CLASSIFICATION 1521

embedded within the outer ring of the bearing. A total of TABLE II

224 vibration data files were collected, under varying load EIGENVALUES FOR SIMULATED DATA
and speed conditions as follows:
• radial load: 0–25 kN;
• axial load: 0–11 kN;
• rotational shaft speed: 0–1500 rpm.
Case II: Three cylindrical roller bearings of type N205 ECP
[24] were seeded with outer ring defects of 0.025, 0.1, and 1 mm
diameter, respectively. A “healthy” bearing was used to provide TABLE III
EIGENVECTOR COMPONENT MAGNITUDES FOR SIMULATED DATA
a reference baseline. Since the bearings used in cases I and II are
substantially different both in design (ball bearing versus roller
bearing) and in dimensions (180 versus 52 mm outer diameter),
the data collected cover a broad range to validate the effective-
ness of the proposed feature extraction technique under vastly
different conditions.
Case III: A deep groove ball bearing, type 1100 KR [25]
of 52 mm outer diameter with a 0.27 mm scratch introduced
across the outer raceway, was continually tested under a ro-
tational speed of 2000 rpm, for approximately 2.7 million
revolutions. Upon reaching this stage, the defect has propa-
gated throughout the entire raceway and rendered the bearing
practically nonfunctional. This case study was designed to
investigate the effect of continuous degradation of the defect,
whereas Cases I and II were concerned with the effect of
discrete defects. For Case III, vibration data were taken at an
interval of about every 7 min. A total of 314 data files were
collected, representing the process of defect propagation.

V. DEFECT CLASSIFICATION
Defect classification refers to the identification of defective
components. To identify the most sensitive features from the
data collected in Case I, the overall classification task was
decomposed into individual subtasks. If the features required
to differentiate defective inner and outer rings as well as the
healthy condition were identified separately by the PCA, they
were then used as inputs to a subsequent classification tool.
Fig. 4 illustrates such an approach of dividing the classification
problem into separate two-class problems. The three sub-
tasks were to differentiate bearing pairs designated as “Inner
Ring/Healthy,” “Outer Ring/Healthy,” and “Inner/Outer Ring.”
For each subtask, only the data corresponding to the two defect
conditions were used.
The procedure followed for the PCA technique was the same
as described for the simulated data before. The eigenvectors
corresponding to the largest eigenvalues, in de-
creasing order of magnitude, were found for each of the three
subtasks. Then the magnitudes of the eigenvector components
for were compared in each of the three subtasks. The two
features selected due to the similarity in the direction with
for each subtask are shown in Table IV. The three identified fea-
tures were and . does not have one output as a clear winner. This feature is espe-
To investigate the effectiveness of these features identified
by the principal components, a classification scheme using an
FFNN with one hidden layer was devised. The output layer con-
tained three neurons, corresponding to the conditions of faults
on the inner (IRF) ring, fault on the outer (ORF) ring, and no
fault (NF). In the case when both an IRF and ORF defect were
Fig. 4. Defect classification subtasks.
TABLE IV
PCA IDENTIFIED FEATURES FOR DEFECTIVE BEARING DATA (CASE I)
present, both neurons gave an output of one, while the third
neuron gave an output of zero. Instead of using the Sigmoid neu-
rons in the output layer, the Softmax neurons were used (Fig. 5).
This was done to enable higher level decision-making, as the
outputs of such neurons are representative of the a posteriori
probabilities of the particular output. The Softmax neuron is
similar to the Sigmoid neuron, except that the outputs are scaled
by the total activation at the output layer [23]. This ensures that
the total sum of the outputs is one, thus establishing outputs that
are representative of the probability of occurrence. This prevents
a skew toward one particular output in cases where the network
cially useful for bearing defect classification, as the network out-
puts the probability of occurrence of a fault based on the training
data.
To test the generalization ability of such a classification
scheme, 30% of the data was used for training while the
remaining 70% was used for testing and validation in equal
1522 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 53, NO. 6, DECEMBER 2004
proportion [26]. This was aimed at examining the performance
of the network dealing with data sets for which it was not
sufficiently trained. For purpose of comparison, a similar
classification scheme with all the 13 input features initially
considered was studied, and the results are shown in the first
two rows of Table V. It was seen that the three features selected
by the PCA technique gave better results (about 1% error) as
compared to the use of all the 13 original features as inputs
(9% error). This demonstrates the advantage of PCA for di-
mensionality reduction of the input space, and to ascertain the
usefulness of particular features for a particular classification
task. Such an approach will be useful when historical bearing
defect data for a certain machine being monitored are available
for network training purpose. Furthermore, the performance
of the RBFs with the three PCA-identified features and all 13
original features was also compared. Neurons in the hidden
layer of RBF networks computed the Euclidean norm (distance)
between the input and the weight vector of that neuron [23].
Comparing to the feedforward neural network, the RBF showed
slightly higher errors in testing for the same classification
task. On the other hand, the advantage in using PCA identified
features ( 2% error) over all 13 original features was signifi-
cant ( 12% error). This demonstrated that the proposed PCA
technique is effective in classifying bearing faults with higher
accuracy and lower number of feature inputs as compared to
using all the original feature inputs.
VI. SEVERITY CLASSIFICATION
Severity classification refers to the differentiation of defective
bearings on the basis of defect size. The defect size can be es-
timated by the magnitude of a representative feature. Since no
guidelines are generally available as to which feature is more
sensitive for a particular defect condition, developing an effec-
tive feature selection scheme is essential to improving the accu-
racy of defect severity classification.
Case I: For this case, two bearings with inner ring defects
(0.25 and 3 mm diameter, respectively) were used to establish
a feature selection scheme for inner ring severity classification.
One of the bearings also contained a 0.25 mm diameter outer
ring defect. A third, healthy bearing was used to serve as the
reference base. Fig. 6 shows a PCA-based two-dimensional rep-
resentation of the data corresponding to these three classes. The
eigenvectors corresponding to the largest eigenvalues and the
sensitive features were identified by the methodology described
before. Since PCA determines the directions with the largest
variance for a given data set, and the data corresponded to in-
creasing severity levels, it was expected that the largest variation
would be along the direction of increasing severity level. This
was found to be true, as the data points corresponding to the
three severity levels were differentiated along the eigenvector
. On the other hand, variation was seen among the data points,
as represented by the eigenvector . This can be attributed to
the different operating conditions. Compared to the result in ,
very little increase in severity can be seen in the direction of .
Since the feature was found to be the most similar in di-
rection to , it can be hence gauged as the most suitable feature
for bearing defect severity classification. It should be noted that
Fig. 5. Softmax output neurons for defect classification.
TABLE V
SUPERVISED DEFECT CLASSIFICATION USING PCA IDENTIFIED
FEATURES (CASE I)
since inner ring defects were monitored, it could have been ex-
pected that either or would have been the most suitable
features, as they directly relate to the amplitude of the corre-
sponding defect frequency. However, the presence of an outer
ring defect of 0.25 mm along with the inner ring defect of 3 mm
in one bearing made a more suitable feature, because the
amplitudes at all frequencies in the defect range were taken into
account for that feature. The proposed method was able to take
this into account without any prior knowledge of the defect con-
ditions. The feature most similar in direction to was the peak
value .
Unlike for defect classification where supervised training was
used to identify defective component in a bearing, classifica-
tion of severity based on the defect sizes was conducted using
unsupervised training. This type of training is applicable when
no prior knowledge about the defect condition of the bearing is
available. Unsupervised training refers to updating the network
weights without the use of any desired output. The updates were
made on the basis of the input presented to the network. For
the presented study, the inputs were features identified by PCA.
A two-dimensional representation of the input data is shown in
Fig. 7. The two features chosen were from the wavelet domain:
power and frequency domain: BPFI . The “physical”
transformation taking place in choosing these features can be
seen by examining Figs. 6 and 7. In Fig. 6, the differentiation
of defect severity clusters along is shown. The two features
most similar in direction to this eigenvector are plotted in Fig. 7,
on two separate axes, thus retaining the differentiation in the
severity clusters.
To identify the means of the three clusters corresponding to
the two defect conditions and the healthy condition, the method
of -means clustering was performed on the data set (Fig. 7).
This is a method to approximate the mean of a cluster, with the
number of clusters being specified by the user [23].
These cluster centers were used as an approximate starting
point for online clustering, which was used for classifying inputs
to their appropriate severity clusters. Also called competitive
MALHI AND GAO: PCA-BASED FEATURE SELECTION SCHEME FOR MACHINE DEFECT CLASSIFICATION
Fig. 6. Inner ring defect severity classification using principal components
(Case I).
Fig. 7. k -means clustering using PCA identified features (Case I).
learning, this type of clustering consists of a single layer
topology that tunes particular neurons to various areas of the
input space. All the information is extracted from the input
patterns alone, with no need for a desired response. The Instar
training rule was applied, which is characterized as [27]
(10)
where is the weight connecting the th input to the th
output , and is the number of training patterns. As illustrated
in (10), a weight update is only made when an output is seen at
a particular neuron. The neuron has a threshold activation func-
tion, with an output being either zero or one. Since weights are
attracted toward the input position (as the weight update is di-
rectly related to the difference of the input and the weight), if
the inputs are normalized, the weights automatically become
normalized. For multiple neurons, the winner-take-all (WTA)
network is commonly used at the output stage of the network to
ensure that the neuron that wins the competition is updated. The
purpose of the WTA network is that the neuron with the highest
1523
activation wins, and gives an output while the others remain un-
changed [27]. The weights were initialized with the values
at the end of -means clustering. This ensured that the weights
were in the vicinity of the mean of the cluster as approximated
by the -means procedure. When a new data point was input to
the network with the weights learnt by -means, it resulted in an
output from the neuron, whose weights were nearest to the new
data point. This is most commonly implemented by the criterion
in the WTA network [27]
(11)
where is the input vector and is weight vector. Hence
the weight nearest to the input was identified and updated.
Identifying the weight is equivalent to identifying the cluster
that the input belongs to. If the wrong weight was updated, then
the data point will be misclassified. This method was applied
to examine the effectiveness of the feature selection scheme by
calculating the misclassification percentage for the two features
identified by PCA. Approximately 30% of the data was used
for unsupervised training by the -means method, whereas the
remaining data were used for online clustering to check for
misclassification. A 0% misclassification was achieved with
the use of features and as inputs. to examine the
effectiveness of the developed feature selection scheme, cross
validation was introduced, which refers to the degradation in
classification performance as new features are added to the
selected feature set. For this purpose, each of the remaining 11
features was added to the input feature set one after another,
and the misclassification percentage was computed, with the
results shown in Fig. 8. Except for rms, the addition of all
the other features increased the misclassification percentage.
Since the addition of features to the feature set has led to
an increase in the misclassification rate, it can be concluded
that the feature set of and is a good selection, thus
validating the PCA approach for selecting features.
Case II: The defect severity data in this case corresponded
to outer ring defects. Fig. 9 shows the application of PCA to
data collected from this second set of data. An analysis similar
to that of Case I showed the expected increase of severity along
the direction of eigenvector . As shown in Fig. 9, data points
corresponding to the 1 mm defect were well separated from the
rest of the data points. However, separation of the data points
representing healthy, 0.025 and 0.1 mm defect sizes were not
as clear. This indicates that even the best feature selected for
this case has had similar amplitudes for the small defect sizes.
Thus, severity classification for defect sizes below 0.1 mm was
difficult to perform. The most sensitive feature found from com-
paring the eigenvector components was the amplitude at BPFO
in the frequency domain . The misclassification percentage
following the -means clustering and competitive learning ap-
proach was found to be higher (9%) than in Case I (1%).
Case III: For this study, a ball bearing with a small initial
outer ring defect was continually run until it was completely
failed (rotation seized up). Since no prior information was
available regarding the defect severity at the various stages
1524 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 53, NO. 6, DECEMBER 2004
Fig. 8. Feature selection validation: misclassification in online clustering (Case I).
Fig. 9. Outer ring defect severity classification using principal components
(Case II).
during defect progression, supervised topology such as feed-
forward network could not be applied. Instead, four data sections
of equal length were used as inputs to the -means clustering
and competitive learning analysis, with each section consisting
of 44 data files. Such a division of the data files formed four
distinct data clusters to which online clustering could be applied.
The two most representative features identified by the prin-
cipal components were the peak value and rms . three different bearing defect configurations. The unsupervised
The overall misclassification rate was less than 3%. Fig. 10
shows the increase in misclassification percentage due to the
addition of more features in the feature set, thus validating the
merit of the features selected by PCA.
Table VI summarizes the results from all the three cases pre-
sented above. The fourth column in the table lists the errors
in classification when the PCA-selected features were used for
clustering. The fifth column lists the average increase in the mis-
classification rate when the remaining 11 features (not chosen
by PCA) were added one by one to the PCA-selected feature set.
In all three cases, the increase in error percentage was substan-
tial. This result confirmed that the features identified by PCA
Fig. 10. Feature selection validation: misclassification in online clustering
(Case III).
ensure effective severity classification at higher accuracy than
the non-PCA-based approach.
VII. CONCLUSION
A PCA-based approach to selecting the most representative
features for the classification of defective components and defect
severity in three types of rolling bearings was developed. The
PCA-selected features have shown to be able to improve the
accuracy of the classification scheme, for both supervised
classification using feedforward neural network and radial
basis function network, and unsupervised competitive learning.
The performance of the PCA approach was evaluated using
classification scheme was investigated on its applicability to
real-world scenarios where no a priori knowledge about the
defect severity is available. The effectiveness of the feature
selection scheme was confirmed by cross validation, wherein
the addition of other features not selected by PCA to the input
feature set has led to an increase in the misclassification rate by
5.1%, 17.2%, and 4.7%, respectively. These results validated
the suitability of the PCA-based feature selection scheme.
The method presented is generic in nature, hence applicable
to a wide range of problems typically seen in manufacturing
equipment and process condition monitoring, health diagnosis,
and remaining life prognosis.
MALHI AND GAO: PCA-BASED FEATURE SELECTION SCHEME FOR MACHINE DEFECT CLASSIFICATION
TABLE VI
SUMMARY: CLUSTERING FOR SEVERITY CLASSIFICATION
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The authors gratefully acknowledges experimental support
provided by SKF and Timken Corporations.
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Arnaz Malhi (S’04) received the B.E. degree in mechanical engineering from
the Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology, India, in 2000. He is cur-
rently pursuing the M.S. degree at the Department of Mechanical and Industrial
Engineering, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
He has worked as a Research Assistant at the Department of Mechanical
and Industrial Engineering, University of Massachusetts. His research interests
include signal processing, sensors, machine condition monitoring, and health
diagnosis.
Robert X. Gao (M’91–SM’00) received the M.S.
and Ph.D. degrees from the Technical University
Berlin, Germany, in 1985 and 1991, respectively.
He is currently an Associate Professor with the De-
partment of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering,
University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he con-
ducts research in the areas of integrated sensing and
sensor networks, system miniaturization, structural
dynamics and vibration measurement, multidomain
signal processing, and wireless communication.
Dr. Gao received the 1996 National Science
Foundation CAREER Award and the 1999 University of Massachusetts
Outstanding Engineering Junior Faculty Award. He is an Associate Editor
for the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT and
Chair of the Technical Committee on Built-in-Test and Self-Test of the IEEE
Instrumentation and Measurement Society.