An Attention-Based Method for Remaining Useful Life Prediction of Rotating Machinery

Data imbalance and large data probability distribution discrepancies are major factors that reduce the accuracy of remaining useful life (RUL) prediction of high-reliability rotating machinery. In feature extraction, most deep transfer learning models consider the overall features but rarely attend to the local target features that are useful for RUL prediction; insufficient attention paid to local features reduces the accuracy and reliability of prediction. By considering the contribution of input data to the modeling output, a deep learning model that incorporates the attention mechanism in feature selection and extraction is proposed in our work; an unsupervised clustering method for classification of rotating machinery performance state evolution is put forward, and a similarity function is used to calculate the expected attention of input data to build an input data extraction attention module; the module is then fused with a gated recurrent unit (GRU), a variant of a recurrent neural network, to construct an attention-GRU model that combines prediction calculation and weight calculation for RUL prediction. Tests on public datasets show that the attention-GRU model outperforms traditional GRU and LSTM in RUL prediction, achieves less prediction error, and improves the performance and stability of the model.