Soft Computing

https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-017-2940-9

METHODOLOGIES AND APPLICATION

A novel intelligent diagnosis method using optimal LS-SVM with

improved PSO algorithm
Wu Deng1,2,3,4,5 · Rui Yao2 · Huimin Zhao1,3,4,5 · Xinhua Yang1,5 · Guangyu Li1

© Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2017

Abstract
Aiming at the problem that the most existing fault diagnosis methods could not effectively recognize the early faults in the
rotating machinery, the empirical mode decomposition, fuzzy information entropy, improved particle swarm optimization
algorithm and least squares support vector machines are introduced into the fault diagnosis to propose a novel intelligent
diagnosis method, which is applied to diagnose the faults of the motor bearing in this paper. In the proposed method, the
vibration signal is decomposed into a set of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) by using empirical mode decomposition method.
The fuzzy information entropy values of IMFs are calculated to reveal the intrinsic characteristics of the vibration signal
and considered as feature vectors. Then the diversity mutation strategy, neighborhood mutation strategy, learning factor
strategy and inertia weight strategy for basic particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm are used to propose an improved
PSO algorithm. The improved PSO algorithm is used to optimize the parameters of least squares support vector machines
(LS-SVM) in order to construct an optimal LS-SVM classifier, which is used to classify the fault. Finally, the proposed
fault diagnosis method is fully evaluated by experiments and comparative studies for motor bearing. The experiment results
indicate that the fuzzy information entropy can accurately and more completely extract the characteristics of the vibration
signal. The improved PSO algorithm can effectively improve the classification accuracy of LS-SVM, and the proposed fault
diagnosis method outperforms the other mentioned methods in this paper and published in the literature. It provides a new
method for fault diagnosis of rotating machinery.

Keywords Intelligent diagnosis · Feature extraction · Fuzzy information entropy · Multi-strategy · Particle swarm
optimization · Least squares support vector machines · Combinatorial optimization

1 Introduction

With the development of science and technology and social

Communicated by V. Loia.
B Huimin Zhao
hm_zhao1977@126.com
1 Software Institute, Dalian Jiaotong University, Dalian
116028, China
2 School of Electronics and Information Engineering, Dalian
Jiaotong University, Dalian 116028, China
3 Sichuan Provincial Key Lab of Process Equipment and
Control (Sichuan University of Science and Engineering),
Zigong 64300, China
4 Traction Power State Key Laboratory of Southwest Jiaotong
University, Chengdu 610031, China
5 Liaoning Key Laboratory of Welding and Reliability of Rail
Transportation Equipment, Dalian Jiaotong University,
Dalian 116028, China
progress, in order to meet the requirements of improving pro-
duction efficiency and reducing production costs in the large
industrial enterprises, the mechanical equipment is devel-
oping toward large-scale, continuous and highly integrated
direction, which leads to their structures becoming more and
more complex. So it will be more difficult to monitor and
diagnose the potential faults for the mechanical equipment.
The reliability and safety of mechanical equipment directly
affect the development level of high-speed railway, machin-
ery industry, national defense, science and technology and
other industries (Chandra and Sekhar 2016; Jung and Bae
2015). If the mechanical equipment breaks down in a very
short time, it will not only cause that the equipment is dam-
aged and the production line is interrupted, but also cause
huge economic losses. It may even endanger personal safety

123

and cause environmental pollution, which will have a serious
impact on society. At the same time, the faults of mechan-
ical equipment take on the consistency and diversity, and
the most faults are long-term and longer development cycle.
It is extremely critical to early discover and eliminate the
faults when the faults occur. Therefore, the research of fault
diagnosis technology for mechanical equipment is of great
significance.
Rotating machinery is an important branch of modern
machinery and equipment and plays a key and decisive role
in metallurgy, manufacturing, transportation, power, military
and other fields. Rolling bearing is an important component
of typical rotating machinery and one of the most vulnerable
parts. Its running state directly determines the performance
of the whole motor. As the motor structure is complex and
it often works under the high temperature and speed, the
motor bearing is prone to various faults. According to the
incomplete statistics, the total number of motor rolling bear-
ing faults is about 44%. All kinds of air disaster, shipwreck
and other malignant accidents occurred one after another due
to motor faults. For example, a plane carrying Brazil foot-
ball players to Columbia encountered a crash due to motor
faults in November 2016. There were 77 passengers and
crew on board, and only 6 people were rescued. The acci-
dent caused serious casualties and huge economic losses.
Catastrophic accidents such as those caused by motor fault
occur frequently, which bring serious losses to society, and
make human beings to more and more realize the importance
of fault diagnosis (Zhao et al. 2017). Therefore, the motor
rolling bearing running state is timely understood, and the
fault types and damage degree are grasped, and the effective
preventive measures are proposed, which is of great practical
value.
In the process of the development of fault diagnosis and
identification of motor bearing, many experts and researchers
have proposed a lot of different fault diagnosis methods
(Wang et al. 2008; Ahmadi and Shadizadeh 2012; Deng et al.
2017a; Bae 2016; Zhao et al. 2011; Deng et al. 2017b), such as
wavelet analysis, expert system, empirical mode decomposi-
tion method, genetic algorithm, particle swarm optimization
algorithm, support vector machine. These methods have their
own advantages and disadvantages in the actual applications.
For example, the wavelet analysis can decompose the signal
into high and low frequencies, but it is not fine to decom-
pose the high frequency. The empirical mode decomposition
method can better decompose the signal, but there exists
the modal aliasing phenomenon. The expert system is not
affected by the surrounding environment in solving actual
problems, but it can only be applied in a fairly narrow field of
knowledge. The genetic algorithm has more variables, when
the range is large or it does not give the range, and the conver-
gence speed of the algorithm is decreased. The least squares
support vector machine can solve the small-sample, nonlin-
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W. Deng et al.
ear and high-dimensional problems, but when it is used to
solve nonlinear problems, the selection of kernel function
directly affects the final classification result. The particle
swarm optimization algorithm is simple and easy to imple-
ment and has fast solving speed, but it is easy to fall into local
extreme point. Therefore, in order to effectively diagnose the
fault of motor bearing, the advantages of empirical mode
decomposition, fuzzy information entropy, improved PSO
algorithm and least squares support vector machine are fully
integrated in order to propose a novel intelligent diagnosis
method for motor bearing. The empirical mode decomposi-
tion and fuzzy information entropy are used to effectively
extract the fault features, and the improved PSO algorithm is
used to optimize the parameters of the LS-SVM to propose
an optimal LS-SVM classifier with the high classification
accuracy. And the actual vibration signal of motor bearing is
used to verify the effectiveness of proposed fault diagnosis
method.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Sect. 2
discusses the related work. Section 3 introduces the PSO
algorithm and its improvements. Section 4 expatiates on an
intelligent fault diagnosis method based on improved PSO
algorithm. Section 5 describes the realization of intelligent
diagnosis method and result analysis by a case. Finally, the
conclusions are discussed in Sect. 6.
2 Related work
For the fault diagnosis of rotating machinery, the fault
research of rolling bearing is very important and difficult.
The fault diagnosis technology for rolling bearings has
been developed abroad. With the development of diagnosis
method and the expanding application field, the reliability
of fault diagnosis has been improved. A lot of fault diag-
nosis methods have been proposed in the past few decades.
Gustafsson and Tallian (1962) used the acceleration sensor to
collect signals for diagnosing the fault in 1962. Fast fourier
transformation (FFT) is proposed to study the vibration sig-
nals in 1965, which laid the foundation for fault diagnosis
technology. In the late 1960s, SPM Instrument Company
in Sweden developed the shock pulse meter instrument. Its
principle is to measure the impact pulse amplitude of the
damaged rolling bearings under load. Therefore, this char-
acteristic is used to diagnose the motor bearing fault and
it can effectively diagnose the early damage fault of the
bearing. Hrating in Boeing Company invented the resonance
demodulation analysis system in 1974. Compared with the
shock pulse method, this technology can determine the fault
and its location and severity. In 1980s, a series of analysis
methods and processing technologies of neural network and
expert system and so on were combined in order to carry
out intelligent monitoring and diagnosis of rolling bearings.
A novel intelligent diagnosis method using optimal LS-SVM with improved PSO algorithm
Bently Nevada company has carried out a series of bear-
ing fault diagnosis test and achieved better results. In recent
years, with the rapid development of modern signal process-
ing technology, along with the continuous improvement in
intelligent optimization algorithm, fault diagnosis technol-
ogy has also made great progress. Li et al. (2000) proposed an
approach for motor rolling bearing fault diagnosis using neu-
ral networks and time-/frequency-domain bearing vibration
analysis by discussing bearing vibration frequency features
of motor bearing fault diagnosis. Rubini and Meneghetti
(2001) proposed the limits of the mentioned methodologies
by showing their application to bearings affected by different
pitting failures on the outer or inner race or a rolling element
and subjected to a very low radial load. Lou and Loparo
(2004) proposed a new scheme for the diagnosis of local-
ized defects in ball bearings based on the wavelet transform
and neuro-fuzzy classification. Chiang et al. (2004) pro-
posed a fault diagnosis method based on Fisher discriminant
analysis and support vector machines. Nandi et al. (2005)
reviewed condition monitoring and fault diagnosis technolo-
gies and methods of electrical motors, such as expert systems,
neural networks, fuzzy logic-based systems. Purushotham
et al. (2005) proposed a new multi-fault pattern recognition
method for detecting localized bearing defects based on dis-
crete wavelet transform and hidden Markov model. Liu et al.
(2006) proposed a fault diagnosis method based on empiri-
cal mode decomposition and Hilbert spectrum for vibration
signal analysis for localized gearbox fault diagnosis. Lee
et al. (2006) proposed a hybrid fault diagnosis model based
on the signed digraph and support vector machine. Widodo
and Yang (2007) proposed a survey of machine condition
monitoring and fault diagnosis using support vector machine
in order to summarize and review the recent research and
developments of SVM in machine condition monitoring and
diagnosis. Rai and Mohanty (2007) proposed a bearing fault
diagnosis method based on fast fourier transformation of
intrinsic mode functions from Hilbert–Huang transform pro-
cess. Basir and Yuan (2007) proposed a preliminary review of
evidence theory and explained how the multi-sensor engine
diagnosis problem can be framed in the context of this theory,
in terms of faults frame of discernment, mass functions and
the rule for combining pieces of evidence. Lee et al. (2010)
proposed a novel multivariate statistical process monitoring
method based on modified independent component analysis.
Kankar et al. (2011a) proposed a fault diagnosis method of
ball bearings having localized defects on the various bearing
components using wavelet-based feature extraction. Kankar
et al. (2011b) proposed a methodology for rolling element
bearings fault diagnosis using continuous wavelet transform
and three machine learning techniques. Kadri et al. (2012)
proposed a novel hybrid algorithm for fault diagnosis of
rotary kiln based on a binary ant colony and support vec-
tor machine. Van et al. (2013) proposed an induction motor
fault diagnosis method based on Fourier–Bessel expansion
and simplified fuzzy ARTMA. Pandya et al. (2014) proposed
a fault diagnosis method of rolling element bearing based
on multinomial logistic regression and wavelet packet trans-
form. Jaouher et al. (2015) proposed an automatic bearing
fault diagnosis method based on empirical mode decompo-
sition and artificial neural network. Rodriguez Ramos et al.
(2017) proposed a novel fault diagnosis scheme based on
fuzzy clustering techniques. The other algorithms and meth-
ods are proposed to realize the fault diagnosis (Ahmadi et al.
2015a,b; Ahmadi 2011; Oliveira et al. 2017; Ahmadi and
Bahadori 2015).
In our country, fault diagnosis technology started in 1980s.
The fault diagnosis technologies and methods are contin-
uously learned and innovated and have rapidly developed.
They have mainly gone through three major stages. The
first stage is before 1980: The foreign advanced technolo-
gies were introduced into China. The tape recorder was used
to record the vibration signals, and an FFT analyzer was
used to analyze in order to study some related fault prin-
ciple and diagnosis methods, which were applied to actual
engineering. The second stage is between 1980 and 1990: A
lot of researchers have constantly studied and explored, in
depth, new fault diagnosis technologies and methods. They
pay more attention to the intelligent signal processing. The
third stage is from 1990s to now. A lot of innovation theories
are proposed to comprehensively consider the signal param-
eters and more timely and accurately monitor the faults.
In recent years, there are many researchers to be engaged
in studying the fault diagnosis technologies and methods.
Their fault diagnosis theories and products have been widely
used in China. Nowadays, many scholars introduce intelli-
gent algorithms to obtain satisfactory optimization results.
Lin and Qu (2000) proposed a denoising method based on
wavelet analysis to realize feature extraction for mechanical
vibration signals. Sun et al. (2004) proposed a fault diagnosis
model based on fuzzy Petri nets for electric power systems.
Yu et al. (2005) proposed a fault diagnosis of roller bearings
based on empirical mode decomposition method and Hilbert
spectrum. Yu et al. (2006) proposed a roller bearing fault
diagnosis method based on empirical mode decomposition
and energy entropy according to the non-stationary charac-
teristics of roller bearing fault vibration signals. Hu et al.
(2007) proposed a novel method for fault diagnosis based on
an improved wavelet package transform, a distance evalua-
tion technique and the support vector machines ensemble. Fei
and Zhang (2009) proposed a fault diagnosis method based
on support vector machine and genetic algorithm for power
transformer. Wu et al. (2011) proposed a new version of fuzzy
wavelet support vector classifier machine to diagnose the
nonlinear fuzzy fault system with multi-dimensional input
variables. Shen et al. (2012) proposed a novel model for fault
diagnosis based on empirical mode decomposition and multi-
123

class transductive support vector machine, which is applied
to diagnose the faults of the gear reducer. Bin et al. (2012)
proposed a new approach based on wavelet packet decom-
position and empirical mode decomposition to extract fault
feature frequency and neural network for rotating machinery
early fault diagnosis. Lei et al. (2013) surveyed and summa-
rized the recent research and development of EMD in fault
diagnosis of rotating machinery, providing comprehensive
references for researchers concerning this topic and help-
ing them identify further research topics. Chen et al. (2014)
proposed a novel intelligent fault diagnosis model based on
multi-kernel support vector machine with chaotic particle
swarm optimization for roller bearing fault diagnosis. Gu
et al. (2015) proposed an effective incremental support vec-
tor ordinal regression formulation based on a sum-of-margins
strategy. Pan et al. (2015) proposed an efficient motion esti-
mation and disparity estimation algorithm for reducing the
computational complexity. Gu and Sheng (2017) proposed
a regularization path algorithm for ν-support vector classi-
fication. Ma et al. (2016) proposed an efficient overlapping
community detection algorithm based on structural cluster-
ing. Sun and Gu (2017) proposed a compressive sensing
of piezoelectric sensor response signal for the structural
health monitoring. Gu et al. (2017) proposed a structural
minimax probability machine for constructing a margin clas-
sifier. Liu et al. (2016) proposed a speculative approach for
spatial-temporal efficiency with multi-objective optimiza-
tion. Kong et al. (2016) proposed a belief propagation-based
optimization method for solving task allocation problem.
Zhang et al. (2015) proposed an intelligent fault diagno-
sis of rotating machinery based on support vector machine
and ant colony algorithm for synchronous feature selection.
Fu et al. (2016) proposed an efficient multi-keyword fuzzy
ranked search scheme that is able to address the aforemen-
tioned problems. Chu et al. (2016) proposed a FOA-SVM
model by combining fruit fly optimization algorithm and
support vector machine to realize the optimization of the
SVM parameters. Wang et al. (2017) proposed a novel
multi-watermarking scheme based on hybrid multi-bit mul-
tiplicative rules. Xue et al. (2017) proposed a self-adaptive
artificial bee colony algorithm based on the global best can-
didate for solving global optimization problems. Wang et al.
(2017) proposed a backpropagation neural network model
by using solar radiation to establish the relationship. Li et
al. (2017) proposed a novel rolling bearing fault diagnosis
strategy based on improved multi-scale permutation entropy,
Laplacian score, least squares support vector machine, and
quantum-behaved particle swarm optimization. Rong et al.
(2017) proposed a novel K+-isomorphism method to achieve
K-anonymization state among subgraphs. Zhang et al. (2016)
proposed a special model known as RELAX-RSMN with
a totally unimodular constraint coefficient matrix to solve
the relaxed 0–1 ILP rapidly through linear programming.
123
W. Deng et al.
vokelj et al. (2016) proposed a novel multivariate and multi-
scale statistical process monitoring method in large slewing
bearings. Yuan et al. (2016) proposed a new software-based
detection approach using multi-scale local-phase quantity
and principal component analysis. Zhang et al. (2017) pro-
posed an optimal cluster-based mechanism for load balancing
with multiple mobile sinks. Chen et al. (2017) proposed an
improved quaternion principal component analysis method
for processing nonlinear quaternion signals. Xiong et al.
(2017) proposed a novel reversible data hiding scheme using
integer wavelet transform, histogram shifting and orthogo-
nal decomposition. Hu et al. (2017) proposed an intelligent
fault diagnosis method based on deep neural networks for
the high-speed train.
In summary, we can see that the traditional fault diag-
nosis methods cannot effectively analyze the signal, which
leads to the inaccurate fault diagnosis results according to
the personal experiences. Intelligent optimization algorithms
make up some shortcomings of the traditional fault diagnosis
method and improve the accuracy of fault diagnosis to a cer-
tain extent. But there are still difficulties to meet the accuracy
demand of fault diagnosis, and the intelligent algorithms have
slow convergence speed and are easy to fall into local minima.
At same time, some intelligent algorithms improve the opti-
mization performance of intelligent algorithm by spending
long running time. Therefore, how to use appropriate mean
to introduce the intelligent algorithms into the fault diagno-
sis and construct new fault diagnosis models and methods in
order to further improve the accuracy of fault diagnosis for
motor bearing, is a problem that needs to be studied deeply.
3 PSO algorithm and its improvements
3.1 PSO algorithm
The PSO algorithm (Kennedy and Eberhart 1995; Chen et al.
2017) is a population-based search algorithm based on the
simulation of the social behavior of birds within a flock. In
the PSO algorithm, individuals, referred to as particles, are
“flown” through hyperdimensional search space. The parti-
cles’ positions within the search space are changed based on
the social-psychological tendency of individuals in order to
delete the success of other individuals. The particle changing
within the swarm is influenced by the experience or knowl-
edge. The consequence of modeling for this social behavior
is that the search is processed in order to return toward pre-
viously successful regions in the search space. Namely, the
velocity (v) and position (x) of each particle will be changed
according to the following expressions:
      
vi j t + 1 = wvi j t + c1 r1 p Bi j t − xi j t
   
+ c2 r2 g Bi j t − xi j t ; (1)
A novel intelligent diagnosis method using optimal LS-SVM with improved PSO algorithm
    
xi j t + 1 = xi j t + vi j t + 1 ,
 
where vi j t + 1 is the velocity of particle i at iteration j
and xi j t + 1 is the position of particle i at iteration j. w
is inertia weight to be employed to control the impact of
the previous history of the velocity. t denotes the iteration
number, c1 is the cognition learning factor, c2 is the social
learning factor, and r1 and r2 are random numbers in [0,1] for
denoting remembrance ability. Generally, the value of each
component in V can be clamped to the range [− Vmax ,Vmax ]
for controlling excessive roaming of the particle outside the
search space. The PSO algorithm is terminated with maxi-
mal generations or the best position of particle in the swarm,
which cannot be improved further after a sufficiently large
number of generations. Therefore, the PSO algorithm has
shown its robustness and efficacy in solving complex opti-
mization problems.
3.2 The improvements of PSO algorithm
3.2.1 The diversity mutation strategy
In the random initialization stage of PSO algorithm, the pop-
ulation diversity is higher. But with the advance of evolution,
the difference of particles is reduced and the population diver-
sity is decreased, which fall into the local optimum and show
the premature phenomenon. Therefore, the diversity muta-
tion strategy is used to improve the basic PSO algorithm.
The advantages of the evolutionary algorithm and the basic
PSO algorithm are combined in order to improve the search
performance. The diversity expression of PSO algorithm is
described as follows:

n n  2 
1  
d =
t
xit j − x tj ,
nδ
i=1 j=1
where δ is the length of the longest diagonal line in the search
space.
In order to keep the population diversity, when there is
d t < dlow , the followed mutation operation is performed in
order to make the population to jump away the local extreme
point.
p tj = p tj + ρ × δ × ζ
t = pt + ρ × δ × ζ ,
pg, j g, j
where ζ ∼ N (0, 1) and ρ is a specified parameter. ρ ≥
10dlow is proposed to meet the requirement of d t < dlow
after the mutation is executed.
(2) 3.2.2 The neighborhood mutation strategy
The particle closely moves to the optimal position of popula-
tion and gradually gathers to a smaller area in the evolution
process. This will reduce the diversity and search ability of
population. In order to improve the search efficiency of the
PSO algorithm, the optimal individual of population is ran-
domly mutated in the generational reducing neighborhood
range to locally fine search. If the fitness value of new individ-
ual is increased by using the neighborhood mutation strategy,
the global optimal individual is replaced by new individual.
Otherwise, the individual is randomly replaced according to
the certain probability. Set the variable Y and is mutated to
get Y  . The calculation formula is described as follows:
Y  = Y + Rk (2r4 − 1); (5)
−1
Rk = (R − R) × (k − k) × k + R, (6)
where Rk is the radius of neighborhood search of kth iter-
ation, and R and R, respectively, are the upper bound and
lower bound of radius of neighborhood search. r4 is a uni-
form random number on [0,1].
3.2.3 The improvement of learning factors
(1) Linear change of learning factor
In the basic PSO algorithm, the c1 and c2 parameters are
given in advance according to the experience. But their val-
ues [0,4] will reduce the self-learning ability of particles. In
this paper, the value range of parameters c1 and c2 is given.
The initial value and final value are c1 ∈ (2.75, 1.25) and
c2 ∈ (0.5, 2.25), respectively. The learning factor function
expression of linear change is descried as follows:

(3) c1 = c1 max + c1 min − c1 max × t/T; (7)
 
c2 = c2 max + c2 min − c2 max × t/T, (8)
where c1 max and c2 max are the initial values of c1 and c2 ,
c1 min and c2 min are the final values of c1 and c2 , T is the
maximum number of iterations, and t is the current number
of iteration.
(2) Anticosine change of learning factor
The characteristics of anticosine strategy are to accelerate the
(4) changes of c1 and c2 in order to quickly perform local search
in the initial stage. It is a more ideal strategy to linearly set the
values of c1 and c2 later. The initial value and final value of
c1 and c2 are c1 ∈ (2.75, 1.25) and c2 ∈ (0.5, 2.25), respec-
tively. The acceleration factors of anticosine are obtained
according to the following expressions:
123

c1 = c1 min + (c1 max − c1 min )
∗(1 − arccos (( − 2t/T + 1)/π )); (9)
c2 = c2 max + (c2 max − c2 min )
∗(1 − arccos (( − 2t/T + 1)/π )). (10)
(3) Arctangent change of learning factor
The research results discovered that the PSO algorithm can
make particles to leap the whole search space as much as pos-
sible, in order to obtain the diversity of particles in the initial
stage of the search and converge to the global optimal solu-
tion with fast speed in the end of the search under the ideal
condition. By analyzing the influence of the change of learn-
ing factors, the arctangent function is used to dynamically
adjust the parameters c1 and c2 in order to better balance the
global search and the local search. The arctangent function
expression is described as follows:
    
c1 = c1 max − c1 max − c1 min × a tan 20 × t/T − e
 
+ a tan e /h; (11)
    
c2 = c2 max − c2 max − c2 min × a tan 20 × t/T − e
 
+ a tan e /h, (12)
where e is the adjustment
  coefficient, e = 6. h =
a tan 20 − e + a tan e .
3.2.4 The improvement of inertia weight
(1) Linear adjustment of w method
The research results of Shi and Eberhart are used in this
paper. The characteristics of linearly decreasing w take on
stronger search ability in the early iterations. It can search
larger solution space and has the ability to find new areas
continuously. But in later iterations, the algorithm will con-
verge to a better area to accelerate the convergence speed.
The expression of the linear adjustment of inertia weight is
described as follows:
w = wmax − (wmax − wmin ) ∗ t/T , (13)
where wmax and wmin are the maximum inertia weight and
the minimum inertia weight: wmax = 0.85 and wmin = 0.1. t
is the current iteration number, and T is the maximum number
of iterations.
(2) Quadratic form adjustment of w method
By linear adjustment of w, the larger inertial weight can
search the larger area at the initial stage of iteration, whereas
the smaller inertia weights can perform better local search
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W. Deng et al.
in the later iterations. And the quadratic form adjustment of
w method is a nonlinear decreasing method, which makes
the inertia weight to fall slowly in the initial iteration and
decrease faster in the later iteration in order to more accu-
rately search. The updating formula of the quadratic form
adjustment of w is described as follows:
w = wmax − (wmax − wmin ) ∗ t 2 /T 2 . (14)
(3) S-shaped function adjustment of w method
The inertia weight w is declined by using S-shaped func-
tion in order to ensure that the population can keep a high
search speed in the initial search, decline the search speed in
the middle search to easily converge to the global optimum,
and keep a certain speed to finally converge to the optimal
solution in the last search. The inertia weight expression of
S-shaped function is described as follows:
    
w = wmax − wmin / 1 + exp 2 × o × t/T − o +wmin ,
(15)
where o is the control factor to adjust the speed and is set to
o = 13 here.
4 A novel intelligent diagnosis method and
model
The fault diagnosis is to select appropriate technology or
method to determine the fault type, the fault severity, the
fault location, and so on. In recent years, many experts and
researchers have proposed a lot of different fault diagnosis
methods, which are used to solve many fault diagnosis prob-
lems and obtain better application results. But some of the
existing fault diagnosis methods could not effectively recog-
nize the early faults in the rotating machinery. The EMD
method can better decompose the signal, but there exists
the modal aliasing phenomenon. The LS-SVM can solve
the small-sample, nonlinear and high-dimensional problems,
but when it is used to solve nonlinear problems, the selec-
tion of kernel function directly affects the final classification
result. The PSO algorithm is simple and easy to imple-
ment and has fast solving speed, but it is easy to fall into
local extreme point. Therefore, in order to improve the fault
diagnosis accuracy for motor bearing, the advantages of the
EMD, fuzzy information entropy, improved PSO algorithm
and LS-SVM are introduced into the fault diagnosis in order
to propose a novel intelligent diagnosis method, which is
applied to diagnose the faults of the motor bearing in this
paper. Firstly, the EMD method based on the direct extrac-
tion of the energy associated with various intrinsic time scales
A novel intelligent diagnosis method using optimal LS-SVM with improved PSO algorithm
Original vibration signal
Select parameters of EMD
Extract the IMFs components
Select parameters of fuzzy
information entropy
Calculate the entropy values
Normalization processing
Obtain the feature values
Feature extraction
Initialize parameters of PSO
Improvements of PSO algorithm
Obtain improved PSO algorithm
Select kernel function of LS-SVM
Train the LS-SVM model
Construct optimal LS-SVM classier
Construct a classier
Input testing sample data
Diagnose faults
Obtain Diagnosis results
Fault diagnosis
Fig. 1 Flow of the proposed intelligent diagnosis method
is used to decompose the vibration signals into a series of
IMFs and residual signal. And the fuzzy information entropy
measuring the complexity of time series based on the con-
cept of approximate entropy and sample entropy is used to
effectively extract the features of vibration signal, which are
regarded as input feature vectors. Then the diversity muta-
tion strategy, neighborhood mutation strategy, learning factor
strategy and inertia weight strategy for basic PSO algorithm
are used to propose an improved PSO algorithm, which is
used to optimize the parameters of the LS-SVM in order to
propose an optimal LS-SVM classifier with the high classi-
fication accuracy. A novel intelligent diagnosis method is
proposed to realize the fault diagnosis of motor bearing.
The flow of the intelligent diagnosis method is shown in
Fig. 1.
5 Realization of intelligent diagnosis
method and result analysis
5.1 Experimental environment and data sources
Rolling bearings are prone to inner race fault, outer race
fault, rolling element fault and so on during the work. So
the vibration data of rolling bearing from Bearing Data
Center of Case Western Reserve University are used to
validate the effectiveness of the proposed intelligent diag-
nosis method (http://csegroups.case.edu/bearingdatacenter/
home). The 6205-2RS 6 JEM SKF deep-groove ball bear-
ing is employed in the experiment. The motor with 1.5 KW
is connected to a dynamometer and a torque sensor by a
self-aligning coupling. The vibration signals were collected
from an accelerometer mounted on the radial vertical direc-
tion of the motor. The fault type in the experiment is crack
fault. The vibration signals were measured under no load (0
HP) at a rotation speed of 1797 r/min. The bearing vibra-
tion signal was sampled at the frequency of 12,000 Hz, and
the duration of each vibration signal was 10 s. The fre-
quency shift is 29.95 Hz. The inner race fault, outer race
fault and rolling element fault were introduced to the test
bearings by using electro-discharge machining method. The
normal vibration signal, inner race fault vibration signal,
outer race fault vibration signal and rolling element fault
vibration signal are collected. They are original vibration
signals without pretreatment. The fault diameter of 0.007
inches is selected as the case here, which is used to show
time-domain waveform of fault vibration signal. The time-
domain waveforms of vibration signals are shown in Figs. 2,
3, 4 and 5. The time-domain waveform of normal vibration
signal is shown in Fig. 2. The time-domain waveform of fault
vibration signal for outer race fault is shown in Fig. 3, the
time-domain waveform of fault vibration signal for inner race
fault is shown in Fig. 4, and the time-domain waveform of
fault vibration signal for rolling element fault is shown in
Fig. 5.
It is shown in Figs. 2, 3, 4 and 5 that the time-domain wave-
form represents the dynamic signal relationship by using the
time axis, which reflects the change characteristics of the
signal amplitude with time. When the rolling bearings work
normally, the amplitudes of vibration signals vary little in
each time interval. When the rolling bearings work abnor-
mally, the amplitude of vibration signals will increase or
decrease in each time interval.
123
 W. Deng et al.

0.5

Amplitude/ µm
0

-0.5
0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200 1400 1600 1800 2000
t/s

Fig. 2 Time-domain waveform of normal vibration signal

Fig. 3 Time-domain waveform 4

of vibration signal for outer race
fault
Amplitude/µm

-2

-4
0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200 1400 1600 1800 2000
t/s

2
Amplitude/µ m

-2

-4
0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200 1400 1600 1800 2000
t/s

Fig. 4 Time-domain waveform of vibration signal for inner race fault

0.5
Amplitude/µm

-0.5
0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200 1400 1600 1800 2000
t/s

Fig. 5 Time-domain waveform of vibration signal for rolling element fault

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A novel intelligent diagnosis method using optimal LS-SVM with improved PSO algorithm
Empirical Mode Decomposition
imf3 imf2 imf1 signal
imf7 imf6 imf5 imf4
res.
Time(s)
Fig. 6 Decomposition result of the normal vibration signal
5.2 Feature extraction based on EMD and fuzzy
information entropy
5.2.1 Vibration signal decomposition based on EMD
method
Vibration signal is an important carrier of the motor status
information, which contains a large number of fault informa-
tion in the motor. Therefore, the vibration signal feature is
an important index to evaluate the running state of the motor.
The empirical mode decomposition (EMD) is an adaptive
decomposition technique, which is based on the direct extrac-
tion of the energy associated with various intrinsic time scales
in order to generate a collection of intrinsic mode functions
(IMFs). The EMD can decompose the complicated signal
into a definite number of high-frequency and low-frequency
components. According to the definition of EMD and the
process of signal processing, it can be seen that the EMD
method is used to decompose the original signal from high
frequency to low frequency. The EMD method is used to
decompose the original signals of normal vibration signal,
inner race fault, outer race fault and rolling element fault to
obtain the intrinsic mode functions, shown in Figs. 5, 6, 7, 8
and 9.
It can be seen from Figs. 6, 7, 8 and 9, the EMD method
decomposes the original signal from the high frequency to
low frequency into a series of IMF components, and each IMF
component is independent of each other and contains differ-
ent frequency components. Therefore, the vibration signal
decomposition method based on EMD can gradually decom-
pose the local characteristics of the original signal of rolling
bearing under different times and scales. And the decom-
posed sequence has more regularity than the original signal
of rolling bearing and provides a basis for efficient computing
of fuzzy entropy value of each IMF component.
5.2.2 Fault feature extraction of motor bearings based on
fuzzy information entropy
A non-probability entropy based on the form of fuzzy set
theory is defined, which considers the overall measurement
of state uncertainty. It can be taken as a measurement of irrel-
evant information with random experiment. The uncertainty
of this entropy comes from the inside, which is useful. There-
fore, it gives a measurement of the fuzziness degree of the
state, and it can also be regarded as an average intrinsic infor-
mation when the decision is made. The quantification of the
fuzzy degree of fuzzy sets is an important aspect of fuzzy set
theory.
Definition 1 Set a substance (information, energy) system,
and the states of each element are {x1 , x2 , . . . , xn }. The
probabilities of random occurrence for each element are
n
p(x1 ), p(x2 ), . . . , p(xn ), and there is i=1 p(xi ) = 1, i =
1, 2, 3, . . . , n. If the information quantity of the determinacy
probability of the state xi is taken as I (xi ), then there is
I (xi ) = − loga P(xi ). Usually, there is a = 2 or e. The
mathematical expectation of the information quantity of the
system states is taken as the information entropy. That is,

n 
n
H (xi ) = p(xi )I (xi ) = − p(xi ) loga p(xi ). (16)
i=1 i=1
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 W. Deng et al.

Empirical Mode Decomposition

res. imf9 imf8 imf7 imf6 imf5 imf4 imf3 imf2 imf1 signal

Time(s)

Fig. 7 Decomposition result of the outer race fault vibration signal

Empirical Mode Decomposition

res. imf10 imf9 imf8 imf7 imf6 imf5 imf4 imf3 imf2 imf1 signal

Time(s)

Fig. 8 Decomposition result of the inner race fault vibration signal

Kaufmann and Delaca extended the information entropy 

n
H (xi j ) = − u(xi j ) p(xi j ) loga p(xi j ). (17)
to fuzzy sets in the 1973∼1974, which is called fuzzy infor-
j=1
mation entropy.
The fuzzy information entropy is used to extract the fault
features of motor bearing in this paper. This technology is
Definition 2 In the fuzzy event xi j , u i j expresses the sub- used to calculate the entropy values of the obtained IMF
ordinate degree of the jth event
 index of the ith event. components. The EMD method is used to decompose the nor-
The probability is p(xi j ) =  u i j dp = E(u i j ), and the mal vibration signal, inner race fault vibration signal, outer
fuzzy information entropy of the ith event is described as race fault vibration signal and rolling element fault vibra-
follows: tion signal of motor bearing into a series of intrinsic mode

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A novel intelligent diagnosis method using optimal LS-SVM with improved PSO algorithm

Empirical Mode Decomposition

imf9 imf8 imf7 imf6 imf5 imf4 imf3 imf2 imf1 signal
res.

Time(s)

Fig. 9 Decomposition result of the rolling element fault vibration signal

Table 1 Normalized values of

No. M1 M2 M3 M4 M5 M6 M7 M8 M9 M10 M11
normal vibration signal
1 0.019 0.025 0.001 0.012 0.008 0.017 0 0 0 1 1
2 0.036 0.039 0.017 0.003 0.047 0.031 0.051 0 0 1 1
3 0.004 0.035 0.001 0.003 0.021 0 0.031 0 1 1 1
.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. ..
. . . . . . . . . . . .
40 0.078 0.042 0.004 0.004 0.003 0.041 0.062 0 0 1 1

Table 2 Normalized values of

No. M1 M2 M3 M4 M5 M6 M7 M8 M9 M10 M11
inner race fault vibration signal
1 0.402 0.231 0.114 0.154 0.215 0.322 0.454 0.251 0 0 0
2 0.757 0.617 0.266 0.301 0.283 0.302 0.471 0.138 0.064 0.22 1
3 0.548 0.644 0.613 0.651 0.385 0.806 0.878 0.375 0.2 0 0
.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. ..
. . . . . . . . . . . .
40 0.711 0.257 0.195 0.419 0.203 0.396 0.363 0.251 0 0 1

functions. Each vibration signal can obtain 40 sets of feature nal of motor bearing is normalized between 0 and 1. The
values. The feature values of motor bearing have different normalized values of normal vibration signal are shown in
dimension, and the numerical values exhibit a very big differ- Table 1, the normalized values of inner race fault vibration
ence; thus, the feature value of horizontal direct comparison signal are shown in Table 2, the normalized values of outer
has a certain degree of difficulty. Therefore, the feature val- race fault vibration signal are shown in Table 3, and the nor-
ues of the training samples and test samples are normalized malized values of rolling element fault vibration signal are
in order to eliminate the influence of different dimensions shown in Table 4. In these tables, the M1 represents the cor-
and take on the comparability among all feature values. In responding entropy values of IMF1, the M2 represents the
this paper, each 40 sets of feature values from the normal corresponding entropy values of IMF2, ...., M10 represents
vibration signal, inner race fault vibration signal, outer race the corresponding entropy values of IMF10, the M11 repre-
fault vibration signal and rolling element fault vibration sig- sents the corresponding entropy values of residual signal.

123
 W. Deng et al.

Table 3 Normalized values of

No. M1 M2 M3 M4 M5 M6 M7 M8 M9 M10 M11
outer race fault vibration signal
1 0.243 0.611 0.039 0.201 0.238 0.166 0.291 0.124 0 0 1
2 0.452 0.255 0.035 0.541 0.165 0.046 0.121 0.125 0 1 1
3 0.363 0.757 0.068 0.132 0.177 0.189 0.213 0.251 0 0 0
.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. ..
. . . . . . . . . . . .
40 0.153 0.487 0.068 0.059 0.147 0.115 0.152 0.125 0 0 1

Table 4 Normalized values of

No. M1 M2 M3 M4 M5 M6 M7 M8 M9 M10 M11
rolling element fault vibration
signal 1 0.182 0.028 0.013 0.019 0.056 0.051 0.091 0 0 0 1
2 0.276 0.032 0.018 0.016 0.058 0.023 0.062 0 0 0 1
3 0.113 0.088 0.019 0.056 0.073 0.04 0.090 0 0 0 1
.. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. ..
. . . . . . . . . . . .
40 0.227 0.082 0.034 0.023 0.052 0.041 0.061 0 0 1 1

5.3 Optimized LS-SVM classifier
5.3.1 LS-SVM
The LS-SVM is a machine learning algorithm based on statis-
tical theory, which has the unique superiority in dealing with
the small-sample learning problem. It can effectively avoid
the local optimal solution of the neural network and overcome
the curse of dimensionality. The LS-SVM is an improved
SVM in essence. The best characteristic of LS-SVM is to
modify the inequality constraint in the SVM to the equality
constraint, and the training error square is used to replace the
slack variable in order to transform quadratic programming
problem into the linear equation problem for greatly improv-
ing the speed and accuracy of model parameters. For the
nonlinear sample set of arbitrary known inputs and outputs,
the LS-SVM model can be constructed by finding suitable
nonlinear transformation in following expression:

l it can accurately predict the unknown data. In the LS-SVM
f (x) = αi K (x, x T ) + b. (18)
i=1
5.3.2 Select the kernel function for LS-SVM
In the LS-SVM, kernel function plays an important role. The
kernel idea of kernel function is to use kernel function to map
linearly inseparable samples into high-dimensional space and
solve the curse of dimensionality. The mapped samples are
linearly separable. Then a classification plane is constructed
in the high-dimensional space in order to separate the samples
of two classes. Because the structure of feature space is com-
pletely determined by kernel function, it is very important to
select the kernel function for designing a classifier. Different
kernel functions make classifier performance to vary greatly
and affect classification effect. There are several commonly
used kernel functions such as linear kernel function, poly-
nomial kernel function, radial basis kernel function, sigmoid
kernel function. In this paper, the kernel function with the
least error and the prior knowledge by experts is used to
select the kernel function, and then the radial basis kernel
function (RBF) is selected in here. The kernel function is
described as follows:
K (x, xi ) = exp ( − γ x − xi 2 ), (19)
where x is a m-dimensional input vector and xi is the center
of the ith RBF and has the same dimension as x. γ is the
parameter of RBF kernel function.
5.3.3 The optimization idea for LS-SVM parameters
The performance of LS-SVM classifier depends on whether
model, regularization parameter γ and kernel parameter σ
are key parameters. The regularization parameter γ deter-
mines the model error and the generalization ability, and
the kernel parameter σ reflects the complexity of training
sample data distribution in high-dimensional feature space.
The regularization parameter γ and kernel parameter σ are
two parameters of LS-SVM model, which must be adjusted.
Because the regularization parameter γ and kernel parame-
ter σ are used as a whole, the parameter values will directly
determine the training and generalization performance of
the LS-SVM. However, two parameters are not necessar-
ily related to the performance of LS-SVM in the theory.
Therefore, in the application, the values of the regularization
parameter γ and kernel parameter σ become a main problem,

123
A novel intelligent diagnosis method using optimal LS-SVM with improved PSO algorithm
and there are no feasible methods to adjust the parameters
in the actual operation. The majority is to use the trial and
error according to the usual experience. But this method is
time-consuming, and the result is far from the optimal value.
In the actual application, it is urgent to propose a practical
method to optimize and select the multi-parameter problems.
Therefore, it is of great significance to study the regulariza-
tion parameter γ and kernel parameter σ of LS-SVM in order
to improve the classification performance of LS-SVM.
The regularization parameter γ and kernel parameter σ
of LS-SVM have great influence on classification accuracy.
However, it is difficult to determine the appropriate values
of LS-SVM in advance. Therefore, the improved PSO algo-
rithm with high optimization performance is used to find
a set of combination values of LS-SVM. The optimization
idea of LS-SVM based on the improved PSO algorithm is
described as follows. The particle dimension of the improved
PSO algorithm is determined, and the position and velocity
are initialized. Then the fitness value of each particle is cal-
culated, the optimal position of each particle is saved, and
the best fitness value for all particles and the best position
in the population are also saved. According to the speed
and the position update formula, the position and velocity
are updated. The obtained best positions are compared with
the set range; if the obtained best position is out of range,
the position of particle is updated. The fitness value of the
updated particle is calculated, and the obtained fitness value
is compared with the historical best fitness value and the best
position in order to select the individual optimal value and
global optimal value. The obtained global optimal value is
assigned to the regularization parameter γ and kernel param-
eter σ in order to construct a LS-SVM classification model,
which can improve the classification accuracy of LS-SVM.
The performance evaluation of LS-SVM parameters is
an important work. The classification interval between two
classes of samples is used as the index of generalization
ability of LS-SVM. But different kernel parameters gener-
ate different feature spaces, which result in the fact that the
interval between them are not comparable. At present, the
widely used k-cross-validation method is one of the gener-
alization error calculation methods. The specific steps are
described as follows. The training set is divided into k sub-
sets of the same size and disjoint s1 , . . . , si , . . . , sk . k training
and testing are executed, i = 1, . . . , k. One subset si for each
time is used to test, and other k − 1 subsets are used to train
the classifier to obtain the number of training points li that
are misclassified. In this way, l1 , . . . , lk are obtained and each
subset in the whole training set is predicted once. The cross-
validation
k method obtains an estimated value of error rate
( i=1 li )/l, which is called the k-cross-validation error. In
this paper, k = 10 cross-validation method is used to select
Gauss radius.
The specific steps of optimizing LS-SVM parameters
based on the improved PSO algorithm are described as fol-
lows:
Step 1 Set the size of the particle swarm and determine the
initial position and speed of the particle swarm.
Step 2 According to the objective function of the optimiza-
tion problem, the fitness function is defined. And
the fitness values of all particles are calculated. (The
accuracy of the training set in the CV sense is used
as the fitness function value in the PSO algorithm.)
Step 3 Calculate the fitness value of each particle in order
to obtain the extreme value of each particle and the
best position of each particle. The best positions of
all particles are compared to obtain the best position
of all particles.
Step 4 The positions and velocity values of each particle are
updated by two extremes.
Step 5 Determine whether the condition is meet; if the condi-
tion is not met, return to Step 2. If the condition is met,
the iteration is terminated and the optimal parameter
is obtained.
Step 6 The obtained optimal regularization parameter γ and
kernel parameter σ are plugged into the LS-SVM
model to train this model.
Step 7 The test data are used to validate the obtained optimal
LS-SVM model.
Step 8 Output the tested result.
5.4 Fault diagnosis results
The extracted 160 feature vectors of the motor bearing are
used as the experimental data. These feature vectors include
40 normal feature vectors, 40 inner race fault feature vectors,
40 outer race fault feature vectors and 40 rolling element
fault feature vectors. For each feature vector, the randomly
selected 20 samples from 40 fault feature vectors are used
as training samples and the remaining 20 samples are used
as test samples. The experiment environment is described:
the Pentium IV, 2.40GHz, 2.0GB RAM, Windows 7 and
MATLAB 2010b. The initial parameters of the algorithm
are selected after thorough testing. In the simulation exper-
iments, the alternative values were tested and modified for
some functions in order to obtain the most reasonable ini-
tial values of these parameters. These selected values of the
parameters take on the optimal solution and the most reason-
able running time of these algorithms to efficiently complete
the problem solving. So the selected values of these param-
eters are described as follows: population size (M = 20),
iteration (Tmax = 200), initial inertia weight (w = 0.8),
max velocity (V = 80), and initial learn factor c1 = c2 = 2.
In the LS-SVM model, the kernel function uses RBF ker-
nel function, and the regularization parameter γ and kernel
123
 W. Deng et al.

Table 5 Experiment results by using different methods

Methods Time 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Avg.

PLM Accuracy (%) 73.75 73.75 76.25 87.5 76.25 87.5 73.75 81.25 76.25 81.25 78.75
Iterations 3 13 8 6 3 7 1 5 7 6 5.9
LCPLSM Accuracy (%) 83.75 80 72.5 88.75 80 80 87.5 87.5 87.5 87.5 83.5
Iterations 3 9 5 14 3 2 4 1 16 29 8.6
LCWPLM Accuracy (%) 90 87.5 90 87.5 87.5 88.75 90 90 80 87.5 87.88
Iterations 1 4 163 10 68 25 1 7 12 2 29.3
LCQWPLM Accuracy (%) 88.75 87.5 87.5 90 87.5 90 88.75 80 90 87.5 87.75
Iterations 1 149 5 57 143 4 158 36 132 1 68.6
LCSWPLM Accuracy (%) 88.75 87.5 80 90 88.75 90 90 90 90 88.75 88.38
Iterations 16 136 5 3 99 25 1 82 3 107 47.7
ACLWPLM Accuracy (%) 85 80 85 88.75 85 76.25 80 87.5 90 86.25 84.38
Iterations 1 6 119 76 3 176 183 136 118 3 82.1
ACQWPLM Accuracy (%) 78.75 90 88.75 88.75 90 90 87.5 90 87.5 88.75 88.00
Iterations 7 2 104 145 17 8 3 1 92 6 38.5
ACSWPLM Accuracy (%) 88.75 88.75 90 90 90 90 87.5 88.75 87.5 88.75 89.00
Iterations 105 3 7 41 1 57 108 95 1 162 58
ATLWPLM Accuracy (%) 88.75 87.5 87.5 88.75 90 87.5 90 87.5 88.75 88.75 88.50
Iterations 105 90 136 101 16 28 71 2 1 90 64
ATQWPLM Accuracy (%) 87.5 80 90 87.5 90 81.25 90 77.5 90 90 86.38
Iterations 7 5 1 24 1 2 6 4 2 14 6.6
ATSWPLM Accuracy (%) 88.75 90 90 90 87.5 90 90 88.75 90 90 89.50
Iterations 161 134 1 1 2 61 1 40 5 2 40.8
Bold values indicate better diagnosis accuracy

parameter σ need to be optimized. The initial values of LS-
SVM are described as follows: the regularization parameter
γ ∈ [0.1, 100] and kernel parameter σ ∈ [0.01, 1000].
The experiments were carried out for 10 consecutive sim-
ulations, and the average is used as the final classification
accuracy. Here, the PLM method is based on PSO algorithm
and LS-SVM, the LCPLSM method is based on improved
PSO algorithm by linear change of learning factor and LS-
SVM, the LCWPLM method is based on improved PSO
algorithm by linear change of learning factor and quadratic
form adjustment of w method and LS-SVM, the LCQW-
PLM method is based on improved PSO algorithm by linear
change of learning factor and quadratic form adjustment of
w method and LS-SVM, the LCSWPLM method is based
on improved PSO algorithm by linear change of learning
factor and S-shaped function adjustment of w method and
LS-SVM, the ACLWPLM method is based on improved PSO
algorithm by anticosine change of learning factor and lin-
ear adjustment of w method and LS-SVM, the ACQWPLM
method is based on improved PSO algorithm by anticosine
change of learning factor and quadratic form adjustment of
w method and LS-SVM, the ACSWPLM method is based
on improved PSO algorithm by anticosine change of learn-
ing factor and S-shaped function adjustment of w method and
LS-SVM, the ATLWPLM method is based on improved PSO
algorithm by arctangent change of learning factor and lin-
ear adjustment of w method and LS-SVM, the ATQWPLM
method is based on improved PSO algorithm by arctangent
change of learning factor and quadratic form adjustment
of w method and LS-SVM, and the ATSWPLM method
is based on improved PSO algorithm by arctangent change
of learning factor and S-shaped function adjustment of w
method and LS-SVM. The experiment results are shown in
Table 5.
As shown in Table 5, Figs. 10 and 11, the average accu-
racy rate of the ATSWPLM method based on improved
PSO algorithm by arctangent change of learning factor and
S-shaped function adjustment of w method and LS-SVM
for motor bearing is 89.50%, which is the best accuracy
among the PLM method, LCPLSM method, LCWPLM
method, LCQWPLM method, LCSWPLM method, ACLW-
PLM method, ACQWPLM method, ACSWPLM method,
ATLWPLM method, ATQWPLM method and ATSWPLM
method. The diagnosis accuracy of the ATSWPLM method
improves 10.75% than the diagnosis accuracy of the PLM
method. The average number of iterations of the ATSW-
PLM method for fault diagnosis is 40.8. The average number
of iterations of the PLM method for fault diagnosis is 5.9,

123
A novel intelligent diagnosis method using optimal LS-SVM with improved PSO algorithm

93
89 88.5 89.5
90 87.8887.75 88.38 88
86.38

Accuracy(%)
87 84.38
83.5
84
81 78.75
78
75
72
M M M M M M M M M M M
PL LS PL PL PL PL PL PL PL PL PL
P
LC CW QW SW LW QW SW LW QW SW
L
LC LC AC AC AC AT AT AT
Methods

Fig. 10 Comparison results of the diagnosis accuracy by using different methods

100
82.1
80 68.6 64
58
Iterations

60 47.7
38.5 40.8
40 29.3

20 5.9 8.6 6.6

0
M

SM

M
PL

PL

PL

PL

PL

PL

PL

PL

PL

PL
PL

SW

W
LC

LC

CL

CQ

CS

TL

TQ

TS
LC
LC

A
A

A
A

A
A
Methods

Fig. 11 Comparison results of the iterations by using different methods

which is the least iterations among these fault diagnosis meth- Table 6 Accuracy analysis and comparison results
ods. No. Methods Average rate (%) Running time (s) Iteration

5.5 Result analysis and comparison 1 PLM 78.75 25.38 5.9

2 LCPLSM 83.50 27.79 8.6
The diversity mutation strategy, the neighborhood muta- 3 LCWPLM 87.88 25.92 29.3
tion strategy, the improvement of learning factors and the 4 LCQWPLM 87.75 27.18 68.6
improvement of inertia weight are used to improve the basic 5 LCSWPLM 88.38 27.29 47.7
PSO algorithm in order to propose an improved PSO algo- 6 ACLWPLM 84.38 27.11 82.1
rithm, which is used to optimize the regularization parameter 7 ACQWPLM 88.00 27.38 38.5
γ and kernel parameter σ of LS-SVM. In order to illus- 8 ACSWPLM 89.00 27.29 58
trate the effectiveness of the improved PSO algorithm, the 9 ATLWPLM 88.50 26.72 64
basic PSO algorithm is selected to optimize the regularization 10 ATQWPLM 86.38 27.79 6.6
parameter γ and kernel parameter σ of LS-SVM. The accu- 11 ATSWPLM 89.50 28.52 40.8
racy analysis and comparison results are shown in Table 6.
Bold values indicate better diagnosis accuracy
As shown in Table 6, all improved PSO algorithms can
find the optimal parameters of LS-SVM for fault classifica-
tion. And the obtained average diagnosis accuracy based on
optimized LS-SVM using the improved PSO algorithms is mal LS-SVM classifier should take on good stability, which
better than the average diagnosis accuracy based on the opti- is key to find the optimal combination values of LS-SVM
mized LS-SVM using the basic PSO algorithms. The average parameters by using improved PSO algorithm in order to
diagnosis accuracy based on the ACLWPLM method is only obtain the higher classification accuracy. In the ATSWPLM
84.38%. Although the best diagnosis accuracy based on the method, the diversity mutation strategy, the neighborhood
ACLWPLM method reached 90%, the stability of the ACLW- mutation strategy, the neighborhood mutation strategy, arc-
PLM classifier is poor, which results in the low average tangent change of learning factor strategy and S-shaped
diagnosis accuracy. The average diagnosis accuracy based function adjustment of w strategy are used to improve the
on the ATSWPLM method is 89.50% and is the best average basic PSO algorithm, and then the improved PSO algorithm
diagnosis accuracy among these methods. Therefore, an opti- can obtain best optimization performance for optimizing the

123

parameters of LS-SVM and obtain the optimal combination
values of LS-SVM parameters. Therefore, the ATSWPLM
method can effectively classify the faults of motor bearing,
and the running time of the ATSWPLM method is 28.52 s.
Compared with other improved PSO algorithms based on
different strategies, the ATSWPLM method takes longer run-
ning time, but the classification accuracy is still the best,
which is 89.50%. From the test results of 11 methods, we
can see that the accuracy rate of 90% has 7 times, and the
change of the accuracy rate is smaller, which fully demon-
strates that the ATSWPLM takes on the better validity and
stability.
6 Conclusion
With the development of science and technology and social
progress, the mechanical equipment is developing toward
large-scale, continuous and highly integrated direction,
which leads to their structures becoming more and more
complex. It will be more difficult to monitor and diagnose
the potential faults. In this paper, for the existing problems
of conventional fault diagnosis methods, a novel intelligent
diagnosis method based on combining the advantages of the
EMD, fuzzy information entropy, improved PSO algorithm
and LS-SVM is proposed to diagnose the faults of the motor
bearing. In the proposed fault diagnosis method, the EMD
method is used to decompose the vibration signals into a
series of IMFs and residual signal, fuzzy information entropy
is used to effectively extract the features of vibration signal,
and multiple strategies are used to improve PSO algorithm
in order to optimize the parameters of the LS-SVM. Then an
optimal LS-SVM classifier with the high classification accu-
racy is constructed and a novel intelligent diagnosis method
is obtained. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the pro-
posed fault diagnosis method, the actual vibration signal of
motor bearing is used to test and analyze. The average accu-
racy rate of the ATSWPLM method based on improved PSO
algorithm by arctangent change of learning factor and S-
shaped function adjustment of w method and LS-SVM for
motor bearing is 89.50%, which is the best accuracy among
the 11 tested methods. The diagnosis accuracy of the ATSW-
PLM method improves 10.75% than the diagnosis accuracy
of the PLM method. And the accuracy rate of 90% for the
ATSWPLM method occurs 7 times, and the change of the
accuracy rate of other times is smaller, which fully demon-
strates that the ATSWPLM takes on the better validity and
stability. Therefore, the experiment results indicate that the
fuzzy information entropy can accurately and more com-
pletely extract the characteristics of the vibration signal. The
improved PSO algorithm can effectively improve the classifi-
cation accuracy of LS-SVM, and the proposed fault diagnosis
123
W. Deng et al.
method outperforms other mentioned methods. It provides a
new method for fault diagnosis of rotating machinery.
Due to the complexity of fault diagnosis, the collected
vibration signals contain a large number of interfering sig-
nals. At the same time, the improved PSO algorithms take
longer running time. Therefore, how to reduce the time com-
plexity of the improved PSO algorithm and eliminate a large
number of interfering signals is the future work.
Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank all the reviewers
for their constructive comments. This research was supported by the
National Natural Science Foundation of China (51475065, 51605068,
61771087, U1433124), Open Project Program of Sichuan Provincial
Key Lab of Process Equipment and Control (GK201613), Open Project
Program of the Traction Power State Key Laboratory of Southwest
Jiaotong University (TPL1705), Natural Science Foundation of Liaon-
ing Province (2015020013, 20170540126, 20170540125), and Science
and Technology Project of Liaoning Provincial Department of Educa-
tion (JDL2016030). The program for the initialization, study, training,
and simulation of the proposed algorithm in this article was written with
the toolbox of MATLAB 2010b produced by the MathWorks, Inc.
Compliance with ethical standards
Conflict of interest The authors declare that they have no conflicts of
interest.
Ethical standard This article does not contain any studies with human
participants performed by any of the authors.
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