IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS, VOL. 63, NO.

5, MAY 2016 3299

A Hybrid Feature Selection Scheme for

Reducing Diagnostic Performance Deterioration
Caused by Outliers in Data-Driven Diagnostics
Myeongsu Kang, Md. Rashedul Islam, Jaeyoung Kim, Jong-Myon Kim, Member, IEEE,
and Michael Pecht, Fellow, IEEE

Abstract—In practice, outliers, defined as data points dpj,k kth data point in class j.
that are distant from the other agglomerated data points Edistl Euclidean distance between the centroid data
in the same class, can seriously degrade diagnostic per- point and the lth outlier.
formance. To reduce diagnostic performance deterioration
caused by outliers in data-driven diagnostics, an outlier- Emetric Feature evaluation metric.
insensitive hybrid feature selection (OIHFS) methodology Fshaft Shaft speed in hertz.
is developed to assess feature subset quality. In addition, Ledist , Redist Two Euclidean distance values specified by
a new feature evaluation metric is created as the ratio of the membership level.
the intraclass compactness to the interclass separability Li Cumulative distance to all the other data
estimated by understanding the relationship between data
points and outliers. The efficacy of the developed method- points, calculated using a norm metric for the
ology is verified with a fault diagnosis application by iden- Di .
tifying defect-free and defective rolling element bearings Mdisti Maximum Euclidean distance between the
under various conditions. ith data point and its neighboring data points.
Index Terms—Data-driven diagnostics, outlier detection, membershipi Membership degree of the ith data point.
outlier-insensitive hybrid feature selection (OIHFS), rolling membershiplevel Membership level to determine outlier
element bearings. candidates.
N OMENCLATURE Nanaldata Number of data points per bearing condition
in the analysis dataset.
Bd Roller diameter. Nclasses Number of bearing conditions.
Ci Intraclass compactness of the ith class. NFN Number of data points in class i that are not
Coverall Overall compactness estimated from per- correctly classified as class i.
class compactness. Nfeatures Number of fault features (or signatures).
cdpi Centroid data point of the ith class. Niterations Number of iterations for both the filter and
D A set of data points in a class. wrapper methods.
Dcentroid Centroid data point. Noutliers Number of outliers in each class.
Di ith data point in a class. Nrollers Number of rollers in a rolling element
Manuscript received April 24, 2015; revised July 31, 2015, September bearing.
10, 2015, and December 13, 2015; accepted January 9, 2016. Date NTP Number of data points in class i that are
of publication February 11, 2016; date of current version April 8, 2016.
This work was supported in part by the National Research Foundation
correctly classified as class i.
of Korea funded by the Ministry of Education, Science, and Technology Ntfreqbins Total number of frequency bins.
of Korea under Grant NRF-2013R1A2A2A05004566 and Grant NRF- Ntotaldata Total number of data points used to test the
2015K2A1A2070866, in part by the over 100 CALCE members of
the CALCE Consortium, and in part by the National Natural Science
k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) classifier.
Foundation of China under Grant 71420107023. (Corresponding author: Ntrdata Total number of data points used to train the
Jong-Myon Kim.) k-NN classifier.
M. Kang was with the Department of Electrical Engineering, University
of Ulsan, Ulsan 44610, Korea. He is now with the Center for Advanced
Ntsamples Total number of data samples in five-second
Life Cycle Engineering, The University of Maryland, College Park, MD acoustic emission data sampled at 250 kHz,
20742 USA (e-mail: mskang@calce.umd.edu). x(n).
Md. R. Islam and J. Kim are with the School of Electrical, Electronic,
and Computer Engineering, University of Ulsan, Ulsan 44610, Korea
n Number of data points (n = Nanaldata in this
(e-mail: rashedcse@mail.ulsan.ac.kr; kim7097@mail.ulsan.ac.kr). study).
J.-M. Kim is with the Department of IT Convergence, University of outlieri,l lth outlier in class i.
Ulsan, Ulsan 44610, Korea (e-mail: jmkim07@ulsan.ac.kr).
M. Pecht is with the Center for Advanced Life Cycle Engineering,
Pd Pitch diameter.
The University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742 USA (e-mail: RVorder Order of random variation in the theoretical
pecht@calce.umd.edu). bearing characteristic frequencies.
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available
online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
S(f ) Magnitude response of fast Fourier transform
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TIE.2016.2527623 of x(n).

0278-0046 © 2016 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.
See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
3300 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS, VOL. 63, NO. 5, MAY 2016
Si Interclass separability of the ith class.
Soverall Overall separability estimated from per-class
separability.
vDi Two-dimensional (2-D) vector used to deter-
mine whether a data point Di is an outlier.
α Contact angle.
ε Constant value to control the membership
level.
x̄, σ Mean and standard deviation of x(n).
I. I NTRODUCTION
D URING the past several decades, model-based fault
detection and diagnosis (FDD) techniques have been
extensively used to enhance the reliability and availability of
industrial systems subject to faults [1]–[3]. However, indus-
trial processes have become more complicated in recent years,
and there is less tolerance for both performance deterioration
and productivity decreases. Hence, conventional model-based
schemes, which demand a deep knowledge of process models
derived from first principles, are impractical for complicated
industrial processes [4], [5]. Fortunately, the rapid develop-
ment of data acquisition, data mining, and machine-learning
techniques is facilitating the collection and storage of massive
amounts of data (e.g., current, vibration, and acoustic emis-
sion), the extraction of useful inherent information, and the
classification of fault types, respectively, in large-scale indus-
tries. Accordingly, data-driven methodologies are alternatives
that can be used for efficient process monitoring and fault
diagnosis [6]–[8].
Today’s FDD approaches use high-dimensional feature vec-
tors to avoid the risks of missing potentially necessary informa-
tion needed for reliable FDD. However, some of fault features
are redundant or irrelevant to the predictive models (i.e., super-
vised and unsupervised learning). If so, these redundant or
irrelevant fault features can be a primary cause of diagnostic
performance degradation. To address this issue, discriminatory
fault feature (or signature) selection has become an indis-
pensable part of reliable FDD. Essentially, the following two
procedures are performed in the feature selection process, i.e.,
a number of feature subsets (or subsets of fault signatures)
are first formed (i.e., configuration process of feature subsets)
and then evaluated (i.e., evaluation process of feature subset
quality). Based on the evaluation process, feature selection
schemes are basically categorized into filters or wrappers. Filter
approaches employ an evaluation strategy that is independent
from any classification scheme, while wrapper methods use
accuracy estimates for specific classifiers during the assessment
of feature subset quality [9]. Accordingly, wrapper method-
ologies theoretically offer better diagnostic performance for
predefined specific classifiers than filter methods. However, fil-
ter approaches are computationally efficient since they avoid
the accuracy estimation process for a certain classifier.
To achieve high-computational efficiency and diagnostic per-
formance concurrently, recent intelligent FDD approaches have
adopted hybrid feature selection (HFS) schemes that appropri-
ately exploit the advantages of the filter and wrapper methods
[10], [11]. Liu et al. presented an HFS approach for the effective
identification of various failures in a direct-drive wind turbine
[10]. More specifically, the HFS method consists of a global
geometric similarity scheme that yields promising feature sub-
sets and a predefined classifier (e.g., support vector machine
or general regression neural network) to predict diagnostic
performance (or classification accuracies) with these feature
subsets. In [11], Yang et al. proposed a method to improve diag-
nostic performance by introducing an HFS framework which
is an unsupervised learning model. This method is effective
for bearing fault diagnosis with fewer fault signatures that
are closely related to single and multiple-combined bearing
defects.
With the negative effects of high-dimensional feature vec-
tors, current FDD approaches are also subject to diagnostic
performance deterioration caused by outliers, defined as data
points that are distant from the other agglomerated data points
in the same class. To address this issue, an outlier-insensitive
hybrid feature selection (OIHFS) methodology is developed in
this study. This method mainly consists of sequential forward
floating search (SFFS) [12], [13], precise assessment of the
quality of feature subsets, and accuracy estimation of a classi-
fier. In this OIHFS, the SFFS is first used to produce a series of
feature subsets. Then, a discriminatory feature subset candidate
is determined among them, where the feature subset candidate
can be insensitive to outliers. That is, to successfully discrimi-
nate the feature subset candidate, proper assessment of feature
subset quality is a key issue. Accordingly, this study introduces
a new feature subset evaluation metric which is defined as the
ratio of the intraclass compactness to the interclass separabil-
ity. Both the compactness and the separability are estimated
by understanding the relationship between the data points and
outliers. A technique to accurately detect outliers based on the
following attributes is further investigated in this study: 1) large
distances from the agglomerated data points in the same class
and 2) low membership degrees in the same class.
Once a discriminatory feature subset candidate is deter-
mined, it is further used to predict the classification accuracy of
a k-nearest neighbors (k-NN) algorithm, where the k-NN algo-
rithm is a nonparametric method of classification. Additionally,
both the filter method for determining a discriminatory fea-
ture subset candidate and the wrapper method for estimating
accuracy with that feature subset candidate are carried out mul-
tiple times via k-fold cross validation (k-cv) in the OIHFS
methodology. This iterative process is effective for reducing
variability of the feature subsets. However, since this process
results in several discriminatory feature subset candidates, it
is necessary to determine the most discriminatory feature sub-
set that will be eventually used for data-driven diagnostics. To
deal with this issue, a decision rule based on both accuracy
estimates and the frequency of feature subsets is employed.
In this study, the efficacy of the OIHFS methodology is vali-
dated with a low-speed rolling element-bearing fault-diagnosis
application.
This paper is organized as follows. In Section II, the data
acquisition environment for performing bearing fault diagnosis
is illustrated. In Section III, the OIHFS scheme is presented,
and its efficacy is validated in Section IV. Conclusion and
suggestion for future work are provided in Section V.
KANG et al.: HFS SCHEME FOR REDUCING DIAGNOSTIC PERFORMANCE DETERIORATION
Fig. 1. Example of single and multiple-combined seeded bearing failures with crack length, width, and depth of 3, 0.35, and 0.3 mm, respectively.
(a) BCI, (b) BCO, (c) BCR, (d) BCIO, (e) BCIR, (f) BCOR, and (g) BCIOR, where the number of rollers is 13, the contact angle is 0◦ , and the roller
and pitch diameters are 9 and 46.5 mm, respectively.
Fig. 2. (a) Machinery fault simulator. (b) Data acquisition system.
II. ACOUSTIC E MISSION DATA ACQUISITION FOR
R OLLING E LEMENT-B EARING FAULT D IAGNOSIS
As mentioned above, a bearing fault-diagnosis application is
used to determine whether the OIHFS methodology is useful
for data-driven FDD approaches. This study uses a defect-free
and seven defective cylindrical roller bearings (FAG NJ206-
E-TVP2). Specifically, defective bearings have either a single
crack or multiple-combined cracks in the following locations
(see Fig. 1): the inner raceway (BCI), outer raceway (BCO),
roller (BCR), inner and outer raceways (BCIO), inner raceway
and roller (BCIR), outer raceway and roller (BCOR), and inner
raceway, outer raceway, and roller (BCIOR).
Since, according to [14], the acoustic emission (AE) sensor
is capable of capturing intrinsic information about defect-free
bearing (DFB) and defective bearings, this study records AE
data sampled at 250 kHz. For this purpose, a PCI-2-based sys-
tem [15] that is connected to a general-purpose wideband fre-
quency AE sensor (WSα from Physical Acoustics Corporation)
[16] is used, as shown in Fig. 2. More specifically, the AE sen-
sor is attached at the top of the nondrive end-bearing housing,
and its distance from the nondrive end cylindrical roller bear-
ing is 21.48 mm. Likewise, this study uses various datasets
involving 90 five-second AE data samples for each bearing con-
dition (e.g., a defect-free bearing and seven defective bearings)
for efficacy validation of the OIHFS method, as presented in
Table I.
A. Load Condition and Defect Severity of Defective
Bearings
In 2006, Al-Ghamd et al. demonstrated the effectiveness of
using a root-mean-square (RMS) method to measure load con-
ditions [17]. Accordingly, in this study, the RMS values are
calculated for five-second AE data obtained from DFBs rotating
at 500 RPM under no-load and load conditions. As illustrated
in Fig. 3, the RMS value for a DFB with a slight load condition
3301
is 0.2714, which is approximately three times higher than the
RMS value of 0.0838 for a DFB without the load.
In addition, Al-Ghamd et al. conducted experiments to eval-
uate bearing defect severity by exploiting the kurtosis and RMS
values, and they concluded that RMS was suitable for mea-
suring the degree of bearing defect severity [17]. Thus, this
study employs the same method to show the defect severity of
defective bearings under the slight load condition. As shown
in Fig. 4, the RMS value increases with bearing defect sever-
ity. More specifically, the RPM values, on average, increase
1.81-fold, 1.97-fold, 2.56-fold, 5.39-fold, 2.53-fold, and 7.1-
fold for the BCI, BCO, BCR, BCIO, BCIR, BCOR, and BCIOR
conditions, respectively, as severity worsens.
III. O UTLIER -I NSENSITIVE H YBRID F EATURE S ELECTION
As illustrated in Fig. 5, a dataset (see Table I) is divided into
two different subdatasets: an analysis dataset and an evaluation
dataset. This is to guarantee the reliability of the performance
evaluation results by isolating the analysis dataset from the
evaluation dataset. In this study, 30 of 90 five-second AE data
samples for each bearing condition are used to configure the
analysis dataset, while the remaining data are reserved as the
evaluation dataset (i.e., 60 of 90 five-second AE data samples
for each bearing condition not involved in the analysis dataset).
That is, the analysis dataset is used to determine the most dis-
criminatory feature subset for bearing fault diagnosis, whereas
the evaluation dataset is employed for efficacy verification of
the OIHFS methodology.
A. Fault Signature Pool Configuration
In Fig. 5, the analysis dataset is used to configure a fault-
signature pool and to determine the most discriminatory feature
subset. According to [18], statistical parameters from the time
and frequency domains are well corroborated with intelligent
fault-diagnosis schemes. Thus, this study uses them as fault
signatures for the identification of various single and multiple-
combined bearing defects. Tables II and III define statistical
parameters for the given five-second AE data, x(n). These
parameters are calculated in the time and frequency domains,
and include the root-mean-square (RMS, f1 ), square root of
the amplitude (SRA, f2 ), kurtosis (f3 ), skewness (f4 ), peak-
to-peak (PP, f5 ), crest factor (CF, f6 ), impulse factor (IF, f7 ),
margin factor (MF, f8 ), shape factor (SF, f9 ), kurtosis factor
(KF, f10 ), frequency center (FC, f11 ), RMS frequency (RMSF,
f12 ), and root variance frequency (RVF, f13 ).
3302 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS, VOL. 63, NO. 5, MAY 2016

TABLE I
D ETAILED D ESCRIPTION OF VARIOUS DATASETS U SED TO E VALUATE THE E FFICACY OF THE OIHFS M ETHODOLOGY

where BPFI is the ball pass frequency of the inner raceway,

BPFO is the ball pass frequency of the outer raceway, BSF is the
ball spin frequency, and FTF is the fundamental train frequency.
In (1), these characteristic frequencies depend on the following
parameters: the number of rollers (Nrollers ), the shaft speed in
hertz (Fshaft ), the contact angle (α), the roller diameter (Bd ),
and the pitch diameter (Pd ).
In fact, narrow-band RMSF values (see Table III) are used as
additional fault signatures, computed around each BPFI, BPFO,
Fig. 3. RMS values of five-second AE data obtained from DFBs rotating 2 × BSF, up to the third harmonics of each of these defect
at a speed of 500 RPM under (a) no-load and (b) slight-load conditions.
frequencies in an envelope power spectrum obtained from a
five-second AE data sample. Moreover, this study assumes
that a bearing contains all of the possible bearing defects
(i.e., a crack on the inner raceway, the outer raceway, and a
roller). Accordingly, in total, nine RMSF values are further
used as fault signatures: RMSFBPFI1 (f14 ), RMSFBPFI2 (f15 ),
RMSFBPFI3 (f16 ), RMSFBPFO1 (f17 ), RMSFBPFO2 (f18 ),
RMSFBPFO3 (f19 ), RMSF2×BSF1 (f20 ), RMSF2×BSF2 (f21 ), and
RMSF2×BSF3 (f22 ).
In a bearing, the radial load greatly influences the force
of the impact caused by rolling over a defect. The outer
Fig. 4. Defect severity of defective bearings considered in this study. raceway is a stationary component of the bearing, and thus
a defect of the outer raceway is subjected to the same force
For bearing failures, there are characteristic (or defect) fre- at each roll. On the other hand, a fault of the inner raceway
quencies at which faulty symptoms must be observable. This is subjected to variable forces because it rotates near the
has prompted us to use statistical values, computed around har- shaft speed. Consequently, all the harmonics of the BPFI are
monics of these characteristic frequencies in an envelope power amplitude-modulated by the RPM of the shaft (i.e., Fshaft ).
spectrum, as additional fault signatures. A detailed description Similarly, 2 × BSF, caused by a roller defect, is amplitude-
of the method for obtaining an envelope power spectrum for the modulated by the RPM of the cage (i.e., FTF). Theoretically,
given AE data is provided in [19]. amplitude modulation by either inner-raceway or roller-related
The aforementioned faulty symptoms can be revealed at one bearing defects produces sidebands that are spaced apart by the
of the following four defect frequencies as the roller strikes a modulation frequency (i.e., Fshaft or FTF) and centered about
local failure in the bearing [20]: the BPFI or 2 × BSF. Furthermore, it is common to observe a
  random variation in the calculated bearing-defect frequencies
Nroller · Fshaft Bd on the order of 1%–2% [21]. Thus, in this study, narrow-band
BPFI = 1+ cos α
2 Pd RMSF values are calculated in frequency ranges with a
 
Nroller · Fshaft Bd random variation of 2%. Namely, RMSFBPFIi, RMSFBPFOi ,
BPFO = 1− cos α and RMS2×BSFi are computed in ranges from 1 − RV2order ·
2 Pd  
  2  (BPFIi − 2 · Fshaft ) to 1 + RV2order · (BPFIi + 2 · Fshaft ),
Pd · Fshaft Bd    
BSF = 1− cos α from 1 − RV2order · (BPFOi ) to 1 + RV2order · (BPFOi ),
2 · Bd Pd  
  and from 1 − RV2order · (2 × BSFi − 2 · FTF) to
Fshaft Bd  
FTF = 1− cos α (1) 1+ 2 RVorder
· (2 × BSFi + 2 · FTF), respectively, where
2 Pd RV order is the order of random variation of the theoretical
KANG et al.: HFS SCHEME FOR REDUCING DIAGNOSTIC PERFORMANCE DETERIORATION
Fig. 5. Overall flow diagram of bearing fault diagnosis.
TABLE II
D EFINITION OF T IME -D OMAIN S TATISTICAL PARAMETERS U SED IN T HIS S TUDY
Ntsamples is the total number of data samples in five-second AE data sampled at 250 kHz, x(n).
x̄ and σ are the mean and the standard deviation of x(n), respectively.
TABLE III
D EFINITION OF F REQUENCY-D OMAIN S TATISTICAL PARAMETERS U SED IN T HIS S TUDY
S(f ) is the magnitude response of the fast Fourier transform of x(n.
Ntf reqbin is the total number of frequency bins.
characteristic frequencies (RV order = 2% in this study) and i
is an index indicating the ith harmonic of BPFI, BPFO, and
2 × BSF (i = 1, 2, and 3 in this study).
In summary, the dimensionality of the fault-signature pool
used in the feature selection process is Nfeatures × Nanaldata ×
Nclasses , where Nfeatures is the number of fault signatures
(Nfeatures = 22 in this study), Nanaldata is the number of data
points per bearing condition in the analysis dataset (Nanaldata =
30 in this study), and Nclasses is the number of bearing con-
ditions to be discriminated in this study (Nclasses = 8 in this
study).
B. OIHFS Scheme
As shown in Fig. 6, k-cv [22] is used to divide the
Nfeatures × Nanaldata × Nclasses -dimensional fault-signature pool
randomly into k Nfeatures × (Nanaldata /k) × Nclasses -dimensional
fault-signature subpools. Accordingly, the filter method in
OIHFS can yield k discriminatory feature subset candidates.
Then, these feature subsets are used in the wrapper method for
accuracy estimation of k-NN. As briefly mentioned in Section
3303
I, both the filter and wrapper methods are performed Niterations
times (Niterations = 20 in this study). This iterative process with
cross validation reduces the variability of the most discrimi-
natory fault-signature subset, which is used for reliable FDD.
More details about the OIHFS approach are given below.
1) A Metric to Assess the Quality of Feature Subsets
in OIHFS: SFFS is used to yield a series of feature subsets.
To determine a promising feature subset candidate from these,
a metric to precisely assess the quality of feature subsets is
needed. Recently, Kang et al. presented an efficient multivariate
feature evaluation criterion using average values of pair-wise
Euclidean distances to measure the intraclass compactness and
interclass separability [23]. Based on this criterion, the authors
greatly improved the diagnostic performance. In practice, the
above-mentioned feature evaluation criterion is effective for
determining a feature subset that minimizes the intraclass com-
pactness and maximizes the interclass separability. However,
diagnostic performance deterioration is likely, since the esti-
mation of both the compactness and separability based on
average values of pair-wise Euclidean distances does not take
into account the impact of outliers.
3304
Fig. 6. Overall process of the OIHFS methodology.
Fig. 7. Example of a 2-D fault-signature distribution, where the dot-
ted circle (left) indicates the degree of intraclass compactness of a
class, and the dotted line (right) indicates the pair-wise Euclidean dis-
tance between two data samples in different classes for estimating the
interclass separability of a class.
The example in Fig. 7 demonstrates the reason that it is nec-
essary to consider outliers in estimations of both the intraclass
compactness and the interclass separability. In Fig. 7, three out-
liers are clearly observed in class 1. Although there is a high
probability that these outliers are not correctly discriminated
into class 1, the ratio of the intraclass compactness to interclass
separability may be low enough when the average values of
pair-wise Euclidean distances are calculated, which means that
these features are effectively used to identify the class 1 from
the others. This is because most of the data points in class 1 are
closely agglomerated and separate from data points belonging
to other classes. Hence, this study investigates a way to mea-
sure both the compactness and the separability by considering
outliers.
In the developed OIHFS methodology, the intraclass com-
pactness of a class is defined as the maximum Euclidean
distance between a centroid data point and outliers. Thus, a
centroid data point and outliers must be detected in each class
so that the intraclass compactness can be estimated. Let D =
D1 , D2 , D3 , . . . , Dn be a set of data points in a class, where
n is the total number of data points (i.e., n = Nanaldata in this
study). In addition, each data point in D corresponds to a vec-
tor involving fault signatures specified by SFFS. Fig. 8 depicts
an example of data point configuration in a class.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS, VOL. 63, NO. 5, MAY 2016
Fig. 8. Example of a data point configuration used in the OIHFS scheme
to yield the most discriminatory feature subset.
For every data point Di , the norm metric is used to compute
the cumulative distances to all other data points, resulting in
n
Li = Di − Dj 2 , i = 1, 2, . . . , n. (2)
j=1
The centroid data point Dcentroid is associated with a data
point yielding the minimum accumulated distance. That is,
Dcentroid is a data point satisfying Dcentroid = Di and i =
arg min {Li }, respectively. In practice, data points can be cat-
i
egorized as outliers if they have both of the following two
attributes: a large distance from the agglomerated data points
and a low membership degree. Specifically, the membership
degree of the data point can be interpreted as the degree to
which the point is affinitive with the class to which it belongs.
To effectively detect outliers, a 2-D vector involving the
aforementioned two attributes, vDi = {disti , membershipi }, is
needed for each data point, i = 1, 2, . . . , n. As depicted in
Fig. 9, the maximum Euclidean distance between the ith data
point and its neighboring data points disti is used as one of
the outlier detection criteria. The number of neighboring data
points is set to 3 in this study. In addition, a membership degree
for the ith data point, membershipi , is assigned by a probability
density function (pdf) of the maximal Euclidean distance. This
KANG et al.: HFS SCHEME FOR REDUCING DIAGNOSTIC PERFORMANCE DETERIORATION 3305

Fig. 11. Example showing how to calculate the interclass separability of

a class.
Fig. 9. 2-D vectors used for outlier detection.
TABLE IV
D IFFERENCE IN M EANING OF THE S YMBOL K W HEN U SED FOR
K -F OLD C ROSS VALIDATION AND K -N EAREST N EIGHBORS

Fig. 10. Example showing the process used to compute the intraclass
compactness of a class.

membership degree is used as another outlier detection crite- where mindistcdp-to-dp = min cdpi − dpj,k 2
∀i, j = 1, 2,
rion. In this study, the membership level for determining outlier i=j

candidates, membershiplevel , is defined as . . . , Nclasses ∀k = 1, 2, . . . , Nanaldata and mindistoutlier-to-dp =

membershiplevel = min {pdf (disti )} + {max {pdf (disti )}
− min {pdf (disti )}} · ε, i = 1, 2, . . . n
(3)
where ε, which controls the membership level, is a constant
value from 0 to 1. Likewise, ε is experimentally determined
and set to 0.25 in this study. As the membershiplevel is decided,
it is possible to maximally obtain two Euclidean distance values
specified by that membership level, denoted as Ledist and Redist
in Fig. 9.
Due to the properties of outliers which are greatly sepa-
rated from the agglomerated data points in the same class,
this study can ultimately identify the ith data point that sat-
isfies disti ≥ Redist and membershipi ≤ membershiplevel as an
outlier, i = 1, 2, . . . , n. As illustrated in Fig. 10, the intraclass
compactness of class i, Ci , is computed as follows:
Ci = max {Edistl } , l = 1, 2, . . . , Noutliers
where Edistl is the Euclidean distance between the centroid data
point and the lth outlier. Likewise, Noutliers is the total number
of outliers in each class. Based on the per-class compactness,
the overall compactness Coverall is finally estimated as
Coverall = max {Ci } , i = 1, 2, . . . , Nclasses .
Fig. 11 pictorially illustrates the process of estimating the
interclass separability of class i, Si , which is calculated as
Si = min {mindistcdp-to-dp , mindistoutlier-to-dp }
min outlieri,l − dpj,k 2
∀i, j = 1, 2, . . . , Nclasses ∀k =
i=j
1, 2, . . . , Nanaldata ∀l = 1, 2, . . . , Noutliers . Moreover, cdpi is
the centroid data point of the ith class, dpj,k is the kth data
point in class j, and outlieri,l is the lth outlier in class i. For the
overall separability, this study uses the minimum value among
the per-class separability estimates, denoted as Soverall
Soverall = min {Si } , i = 1, 2, . . . , Nclasses . (7)
Based on both Coverall and Soverall , the metric to assess the
quality of any given feature subset by SFFS, Emetric , is defined
as follows:
Coverall
Emetric = . (8)
Soverall
In summary, discriminatory feature subset candidates deter-
mined through the use of well-defined intraclass compactness
(4) and interclass separability estimates are helpful for reduc-
ing diagnostic performance degradation caused by outliers in
data-driven diagnostics.
2) Accuracy Estimation of the k-NN Classifier in
OIHFS: In Fig. 6, two-fold cross validation generates two
randomly portioned fault-signature subpools, denoted as
Nfeatures × (Nanaldata /2) × Nclasses -dimensional fault-signature
(5) subpool1 and Nfeatures × (Nanaldata /2) × Nclasses -dimensional
fault-signature subpool2 , respectively. For accuracy estimation
of the k-NN classifier, a subpool used to yield a discriminatory
feature subset candidate is reserved as a training dataset, while
(6) the other subpool is employed as a test dataset. This is repeated
3306
Fig. 12. Predictive classification accuracy of the k -NN classifier using 40 discriminatory feature subset candidates.
TABLE V
S UMMARY OF F EATURE S UBSETS D ETERMINED BY THE OIHFS
M ETHODOLOGY
until each subpool is reserved as either a training dataset or a
test dataset at least once.
In OIHFS, the aforementioned accuracy estimation process
is repeated Niterations times. Hence, a decision rule is required so
that the most discriminatory feature subset can be determined
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS, VOL. 63, NO. 5, MAY 2016
TABLE VI
S UMMARY OF D ISCRIMINATORY F EATURE S UBSETS Y IELDED
BY THE F EATURE E VALUATION M ETRIC IN [23]
from Niterations × k feature subset candidates. More specifically,
the decision rule is based not only on the predictive classifica-
tion accuracy (or diagnostic performance) of the k-NN classifier
but also on the frequency of the feature subsets. In this decision
rule, the predictive classification accuracy has the priority in the
KANG et al.: HFS SCHEME FOR REDUCING DIAGNOSTIC PERFORMANCE DETERIORATION 3307

TABLE VII
AVERAGE C LASSIFICATION ACCURACIES AND S ENSITIVITIES FOR I DENTIFYING D EFECT-F REE AND D EFECTIVE B EARINGS
VIA 20 T IMES K -CV (U NIT : %)

determination of which feature subset to use in the performance

evaluation process (see Fig. 5). This study further considers
the frequency of feature subset candidates in the decision rule.
This is because some feature subset candidates may yield the
same high level of classification accuracy even though they are
different from each other.
In this study, the predictive classification accuracy (CA) is
defined as follows:
Nclasses NTP
CA = × 100 (%)
Ntotaldata
where Ntotaldata is the total number of data points used to test the
k-NN classifier and NTP is the number of data points in class i
that are correctly classified as class i, i = 1, 2, . . . , Nclasses .
C. Summary of k Values for Both k-Fold Cross Validation
and k-Nearest Neighbors
Although the use of the same symbol k for both k-cv and
k-NN may reduce readability, this symbol is extensively used in
the literature to denote not only the number of randomly divided
folds in k-cv but also the number of neighbors for measuring the
degree of affinity with classes in k-NN. To enhance readability,
Table IV clarifies the difference in meaning when the symbol
“k” is used for k-cv and k-NN.
Fig. 13. 2-D representation of discriminatory feature subsets yielded by
the OIHFS approach for (a) dataset 1 and (b) dataset 10.
(9)
IV. E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS
A. Most Discriminatory Fault-Signature Subset
Determined by the OIHFS Methodology
As mentioned in Section III-B, Niterations × k discriminatory
feature subset candidates are eventually created (Niterations = 20
and k = 2 for k-cv). This study then examines the predic-
tive classification accuracy of the k-NN classifier using these
40 discriminatory feature subset candidates. As depicted in
Fig. 12, it is obvious that the classification performance largely
depends on the aforementioned feature subsets. Accordingly,
this study evaluates each of them by employing the decision
rule described in Section III-B. Table V lists the most discrimi-
natory feature subset for each dataset (see Table I), and each of
these subsets is used to identify various bearing conditions in
the performance evaluation process.
3308 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS, VOL. 63, NO. 5, MAY 2016

TABLE VIII
AVERAGE E XECUTION T IMES FOR B OTH FAULT S IGNATURE C ALCULATIONS AND ACCURACY E STIMATIONS

B. Efficacy Verification of the OIHFS Methodology for a low rotational speeds. To analyze this phenomenon, this study
Bearing Fault-Diagnosis Application employs a 2-D representation of discriminatory feature subsets
yielded by the OIHFS approach, as depicted in Fig. 13. For
The key difference between the OIHFS and other conven-
bearings with small cracks at low rotational speeds (e.g., dataset
tional HFS methodologies is the manner of assessing the quality
1), fault signatures in the same class are not as closely agglom-
of feature subsets. Hence, this section validates the effective-
erated as those obtained from bearings with large cracks at high
ness of the feature subset evaluation metric (under the OIHFS
rotational speeds (e.g., dataset 10). In addition, fault signatures
scheme) in comparison with one using average values of pair-
belonging to BCO and BCIO are not clearly separated, which
wise Euclidean distances [23]. Table VI summarizes the most
eventually results in diagnostic performance degradation.
discriminatory feature subset for each dataset yielded by the
In this study, the OIHFS methodology efficiently reduces the
feature subset evaluation metric in [23].
dimensionality of the feature vector by eliminating irrelevant
k-cv is also employed to estimate the generalized classifica-
and redundant fault signatures for reliable FDD. This implies
tion accuracy in the performance evaluation process. That is,
that it is possible to alleviate the computational burden of con-
an evaluation dataset (see Fig. 5) is randomly divided into k
figuring a feature vector in real FDD applications. Moreover,
mutual folds, denoted as F1 , F2 , . . . , Fk . At the ith iteration
low-dimensional feature vectors can contribute to reducing the
in k-cv, fold Fi is reserved as a training dataset for the k-NN
time needed to compute the classification accuracy of a clas-
classifier, while the remaining folds are used to test the k-NN
sifier (e.g., k-NN in this study). Table VIII shows the speedups
classifier, in which the test of the k-NN classifier is performed
obtained due to the use of the low-dimensional feature vector in
k times. In addition, this study iteratively performs the per-
the developed method; all the experiments have been performed
formance evaluation process to increase the reliability of the
with MATLAB 2008a on an Intel Core i3-2120 CPU operating
diagnostic results. Hence, the final diagnostic performance is
at 3.30 GHz. As shown in Table VIII, the average time required
defined as the average of Niterations × k classification accuracies
to execute a given task within the bearing fault-diagnosis appli-
(ACA).
cation largely depends on the time required to calculate fault
Table VII presents the diagnostic performance for each
signatures. The average execution time for predicting classifica-
dataset (see Table I) in terms of the ACA, which is helpful for
tion accuracy is almost negligible. In summary, the developed
understanding the overall diagnostic performance. In addition,
method achieves 2.15- to 29.7-fold speedups by significantly
sensitivity, a useful metric for evaluating the diagnostic perfor-
reducing the execution times in fault-signature calculations.
mance for each bearing condition, is provided in Table VII, and
is defined as
NTP V. C ONCLUSION AND F UTURE W ORK
Sensitivity = × 100 (%) (10)
NTP + NFN The OIHFS scheme was developed to reduce diagnostic
where NFN is the number of data points in class i that are not performance deterioration caused by outliers in data-driven
correctly classified as class i. diagnostics. Its key contribution is the assessment of the qual-
As shown in Table VII, the OIHFS method enhances the ity of feature subsets. The developed feature subset evaluation
ACAs of 0.44% and 10% compared to the ACAs obtained metric, defined as the ratio of the intraclass compactness to the
when all the fault signatures and feature subsets specified by the interclass separability estimated by understanding the relation-
method in [23] are used, respectively. Consequently, the OIHFS ship between data points and outliers, is capable of determining
methodology can effectively solve the diagnostic performance the most discriminatory feature subset, and can minimize the
degradation problem caused by outliers. negative impacts of outliers. The experimental results indicated
An interesting observation in Table VII is that the diagnos- that feature subsets specified by the developed metric are more
tic performance decreases for bearings with small cracks at effective for alleviating diagnostic performance degradation
KANG et al.: HFS SCHEME FOR REDUCING DIAGNOSTIC PERFORMANCE DETERIORATION
than feature subsets determined by the metric in [23]. The
developed approach achieved diagnostic performance improve-
ments of up to 30.0% over the conventional method in terms
of ACA. In addition, the OIHFS method reduced the execu-
tion time of the bearing fault diagnosis application by efficiently
reducing the dimensionality of the originally produced feature
vector.
This study presented a method of detecting outliers based on
the following attributes: 1) large distances from the agglom-
erated data points in the same class and 2) low membership
degrees. In this method, the membership level was experimen-
tally set to a constant value so that outliers could be identified.
The downside of this is that a fixed membership level may lead
to misdetection of outliers. Thus, future research will explore
a technique in which the membership level is set adaptively so
that outliers can be detected more accurately in real data-driven
FDD applications.
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Myeongsu Kang received the B.E. and M.S.
degrees in computer engineering and informa-
tion technology and the Ph.D. degree in electri-
cal, electronic, and computer engineering from
the University of Ulsan, Ulsan, Korea, in 2008,
2010, and 2015, respectively.
He is currently a Research Associate with
the Center for Advanced Life Cycle Engineering,
The University of Maryland, College Park, MD,
USA. His research interests include data-driven
prognostics and health management using sig-
nal processing, data mining, and machine learning techniques, and
high-performance computing.
Md. Rashedul Islam received the B.S. degree
in computer science and engineering from the
University Rajshahi, Rajshahi, Bangladesh, in
2006, and the M.S. degree in informatics from
the Högskolan i Borås (University of Boras),
Boras, Sweden, in 2011. He is currently working
toward the Ph.D. degree in electrical, electronic,
and computer engineering at the University of
Ulsan, Ulsan, Korea.
He is an Assistant Professor (on study leave)
with the Department of Computer Science and
Engineering, University of Asia Pacific (UAP), Dhaka, Bangladesh. His
research interests include signal processing, machine learning, data-
driven diagnostics and prognostics, parallel processing, and GPS.
Jaeyoung Kim received the B.S. and M.S.
degrees in electrical, electronic, and com-
puter engineering from the University of Ulsan,
Ulsan, Korea, in 2012 and 2015, respectively,
where he is currently working toward the Ph.D.
degree in electrical, electronics, and computer
engineering.
His research interests include artificial intelli-
gence, data-driven prognostics and health man-
agement, and high-performance computing.
3310 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL ELECTRONICS, VOL. 63, NO. 5, MAY 2016
Jong-Myon Kim (M’05) received the B.S.
degree in electrical engineering from Myongji
University, Yongin, Korea, in 1995, the M.S.
degree in electrical and computer engineering
from the University of Florida, Gainesville, FL,
USA, in 2000, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical
and computer engineering from Georgia Institute
of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA, in 2005.
He is currently a Professor with the
Department of IT Convergence and also a
Vice President of the Foundation for Industry
Cooperation, University of Ulsan, Ulsan, Korea. His research interests
include multimedia-specific processor architecture, fault diagnosis and
condition monitoring, parallel processing, and embedded systems.
Michael Pecht (M’83–SM’90–F’92) received the
dual M.S. degree in electrical engineering and
engineering mechanics and the Ph.D. degree
in engineering mechanics from the University
of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, WI, USA, in
1978, 1979, and 1982, respectively.
He is the Founder of the Center for Advanced
Life Cycle Engineering, The University of
Maryland, College Park, MD, USA, which is
funded by more than 150 of the world’s lead-
ing electronics companies at more than U.S. $6
million/year. He is also the George E. Dieter Professor of Mechanical
Engineering and a Professor of Applied Mathematics with The University
of Maryland. He has authored/coauthored more than 20 books on elec-
tronic product development, use, and supply chain management and
more than 500 technical articles.