Small sample gearbox fault diagnosis based on improved deep forest in noisy environments

Deep forest methods have gradually emerged as a well-liked substitute for conventional deep neural networks in diagnosing faults in mechanical systems. However, in practical industrial applications, limited training data and severe noise interference pose significant challenges to these models. Existing deep forest models have limitations in information extraction, making it difficult to handle the complexities of industrial environments. To better meet the practical needs of industrial applications, this paper proposes an improved deep forest model – sgic-Forest, specifically designed for fault diagnosis of small sample gearboxes in noisy environments. First, we developed a stacked multi-grained scanning module, which enhances the diversity of feature extraction by integrating the advantages of multiple base learners, thereby better addressing the complexities of industrial data. Secondly, we introduced an important feature selection module, which effectively filters out irrelevant information, significantly improving the model’s robustness in high-noise environments. Experiments on two gearbox datasets show that the proposed method outperforms the basic deep forest model and mainstream deep learning methods in terms of diagnostic accuracy under small sample and noisy conditions.