A Bearing Fault Diagnosis Method in Scenarios of Imbalanced Samples and Insufficient Labeled Samples

In practical working environments, rolling bearings are one of the components that are prone to failure. Their vibration signal samples are faced with challenges, mainly including the imbalance between normal and fault samples as well as an insufficient number of labeled samples. This study proposes a sample-expansion method based on generative adversarial networks (GANs) and a fault diagnosis method based on a transformer to solve the above issues. First, selective kernel networks (SKNets) and a genetic algorithm (GA) were introduced to construct a conditional variational autoencoder–evolutionary generative adversarial network with a selective kernel (CVAE-SKEGAN) to achieve a balance between the proportion of normal and faulty samples. Then, a semi-supervised learning–variational convolutional Swin transformer (SSL-VCST) network was built for the fault classification, specifically introducing variational attention and semi-supervised mechanisms to reduce the overfitting risk of the model and solve the problem of a shortage of labeled samples. Three typical operating conditions were designed for the multi-case applicability verification. The results show that the method proposed in this study had good application effects when solving both sample imbalances and labeled-sample deficiencies and improved the accuracy of fault diagnosis in the above scenarios.