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With the rapid development of artificial intelligence in recent years, intelligent evaluation of college students' growth by means of the monitoring data from training processes is becoming a promising technique in the field intelligent education. Current studies, however, tend to utilize course grades, which are objective, to predict students' grade-point averages (GPAs), but usually neglect subjective factors like psychological resilience. To solve this problem, this paper takes mechanical engineering as the research object, and proposes a new machine-learning-driven GPA prediction approach to evaluate the academic performance of engineering students by incorporating psychological evaluation data into basic course scores. Specifically, this paper adopts SCL-90 psychological assessment data collected in the freshman year, including key mental health indicators such as somatization, depression, hostility, and interpersonal sensitivity indicators, as well as professional basic course scores, including mechanical principles, mechanical design, advanced mathematics, and engineering drawing. Four representative machine learning algorithms, Support Vector Machine (SVM), CNN-CBAM, Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) and Classification and Regression Tree (CART) that include deep and shallow models, respectively, are then employed to build a classification model for GPA prediction. This paper designs a validation experiment by tracking 229 students from the 2020 class from the School of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering of Henan University of Science and Technology, China. The students' academic performance in senior grades is divided into five classes to use as the prediction labels. It is verified that psychological data and course data can be effectively integrated into GPA prediction for college students, with an accuracy rate of 83.64%. Meanwhile, this paper also reveals that anxiety indicators in the psychological assessment data have the greatest impact on college students' academic performance, followed by interpersonal sensitivity. The experimental results also show that, for predicting junior year GPAs, psychological factors play more important role than they do in predicting sophomore GPAs. Suggestions are therefore given: the current practice in existing undergraduate teaching, i.e., only conducting psychological assessments in the initial freshman year, should be updated by introducing follow-up psychological assessments in each academic year. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The quick development of machine learning techniques provides a superior capability for manufacturing enterprises to make effective decisions about inventory management based on spare parts demand (SPD) data. Since SPD sequences in practical maintenance applications usually show an intermittent distribution, it is not easy to represent the demand pattern of such sequences. Meanwhile, there are some aspects like manual report errors, environmental interference, sudden project changes, etc., that bring large and unexpected fluctuations to SPD sequences, i.e., anomalous demands. The inventory decision made based on the SPD sequences with anomalous demands is not trusted by enterprise engineers. For such SPD data, there are two great concerns, i.e., false alarms in which sparse demands are recognized to be anomalous and missing alarms in which the anomalous demands are categorized as normal due to their adjacent demands having extreme values. To address these concerns, a new unsupervised anomaly-detection method for intermittent time series is proposed based on a dual-tailed probability. First, the multi-way delay embedding transform (MDT) was applied on the raw SPD sequences to obtain higher-order tensors. Through Tucker tensor decomposition, the disturbance of extreme demands can be effectively reduced. For the reconstructed SPD sequences, then, the tail probability at each time point, as well as the empirical cumulative distribution function were calculated based on the probability of the demand occurrence. Second, to lessen the disturbance of sparse demand, the non-zero demand sequence was distilled from the raw SPD sequence, with the tail probability at each time point being calculated. Finally, the obtained dual-tailed probabilities were fused to determine the anomalous degree of each demand. The proposed method was validated on the two actual SPD datasets, which were collected from a large engineering manufacturing enterprise and a large vehicle manufacturing enterprise in China, respectively. The results demonstrated that the proposed method can effectively lower the false alarm rate and missing alarm rate with no supervised information provided. The detection results were trustworthy enough and, more importantly, computationally inexpensive, showing significant applicability to large-scale after-sales parts management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In practical industrial scenarios, mechanical equipment frequently operates within dynamic working conditions. To address the challenge posed by the incongruent data distribution between source and target domains amidst varying operational contexts, particularly in the absence of labels within the target domain, this study presents a solution involving deep feature construction and an unsupervised domain adaptation strategy for rolling bearing fault diagnosis across varying working conditions. The proposed methodology commences by subjecting the original vibration signal of the bearing to a fast Fourier transform (FFT) to extract spectral information. Subsequently, an innovative amalgamation of a one-dimensional convolutional layer and an auto-encoder were introduced to construct a convolutional auto-encoder (CAE) dedicated to acquiring depth features from the spectrum. In a subsequent step, leveraging the depth features gleaned from the convolutional auto-encoder, a balanced distribution adaptation (BDA) mechanism was introduced to facilitate the domain adaptation of features from both the source and target domains. The culminating stage entails the classification of adapted features using the K-nearest neighbor (KNN) algorithm to attain cross-domain diagnosis. Empirical evaluations are conducted on two extensively used datasets. The findings substantiate that the proposed approach is capable of accomplishing the cross-domain fault diagnosis task even without labeled data within the target domain. Furthermore, the diagnostic accuracy and stability of the proposed method surpass those of various other migration and deep learning approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Demand for spare parts, which is triggered by element failure, project schedule and reliability demand, etc., is a kind of sensing data to the aftermarket service of large manufacturing enterprises. Prediction of the demand for spare parts plays a crucial role in inventory management and lifecycle quality management for the aftermarket service of large-scale manufacturing enterprises. In real-life applications, however, demand for spare parts occurs randomly and fluctuates greatly, and the demand sequence shows obvious intermittent distribution characteristics. Additionally, due to factors such as reporting mistakes made by personnel or environmental changes, the actual data of the demand for spare parts are prone to abnormal variations. It is thus hard to capture the evolutional pattern of the demand for spare parts by traditional time series forecasting methods. The reliability of prediction results is also reduced. To address these concerns, this paper proposes a tensor optimization-based robust interval prediction method of intermittent time series for the aftersales demand for spare parts. First, using the advantages of tensor decomposition to effectively mine intrinsic information from raw data, a sequence-smoothing network based on tensor decomposition and a stacked autoencoder is proposed. Tucker decomposition is applied to the hidden features of the encoder, and the obtained core tensor is reconstructed through the decoder, thus allowing us to smooth outliers in the original demand sequence. An alternating optimization algorithm is further designed to find the optimal sequence feature representation and tensor decomposition factors for the extraction of the evolutionary trend of the intermittent series. Second, an adaptive interval prediction algorithm with a dynamic update mechanism is designed to obtain point prediction values and prediction intervals for the demand sequence, thereby improving the reliability of the forecast. The proposed method is validated using the actual aftersales data from a large engineering manufacturing enterprise in China. The experimental results demonstrate that, compared with typical time series prediction methods, the proposed method can effectively grab the evolutionary trend of various intermittent series and improve the accuracy of predictions made with small-sample intermittent series. Moreover, the proposed method provides a reliable elastic prediction interval when distortion occurs in the prediction results, offering a new solution for intelligent planning decisions related to spare parts in practical maintenance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The demand for complex equipment aftermarket parts is mostly sporadic, showing typical intermittent characteristics as a whole, resulting in the evolution law of a single demand series having insufficient information, which restricts the prediction effect of existing methods. To solve this problem, this paper proposes a prediction method of intermittent feature adaptation from the perspective of transfer learning. Firstly, to extract the intermittent features of the demand series, an intermittent time series domain partitioning algorithm is proposed by mining the demand occurrence time and demand interval information in the series, then constructing the metrics, and using a hierarchical clustering algorithm to divide all the series into different sub-source domains. Secondly, the intermittent and temporal characteristics of the sequence are combined to construct a weight vector, and the learning of common information between domains is accomplished by weighting the distance of the output features of each cycle between domains. Finally, experiments are conducted on the actual after-sales datasets of two complex equipment manufacturing enterprises. Compared with various prediction methods, the method in this paper can effectively predict future demand trends, and the prediction's stability and accuracy are significantly improved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the actual maintenance of manufacturing enterprises, abnormal changes in after-sale parts demand data often make the inventory strategies unreasonable. Due to the intermittent and small-scale characteristics of demand sequences, it is difficult to accurately identify the anomalies in such sequences using current anomaly detection algorithms. To solve this problem, this paper proposes an unsupervised anomaly detection method for intermittent time series. First, a new abnormal fluctuation similarity matrix is built by calculating the squared coefficient of variation and the maximum information coefficient from the macroscopic granularity. The abnormal fluctuation sequence can then be adaptively screened by using agglomerative hierarchical clustering. Second, the demand change feature and interval feature of the abnormal sequence are constructed and fed into the support vector data description model to perform hypersphere training. Then, the unsupervised abnormal point location detection is realized at the micro-granularity level from the abnormal sequence. Comparative experiments are carried out on the actual demand data of after-sale parts of two large manufacturing enterprises. The results show that, compared with the current representative anomaly detection methods, the proposed approach can effectively identify the abnormal fluctuation position in the intermittent sequence of small samples, and also obtain better detection results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aiming at the online detection problem of rolling bearings, the limited amount of target bearing data leads to insufficient model in training and feature representation. It is difficult for the online detection model to construct an accurate decision boundary. To solve the problem, a multi-scale robust anomaly detection method based on data enhancement technology is proposed in this paper. Firstly, the training data are transformed into multiple subspaces through the data enhancement technology. Then, a prototype clustering method is introduced to enhance the robustness of features representation under the framework of the robust deep auto-encoding algorithm. Finally, the robust multi-scale Deep-SVDD hyper sphere model is constructed to achieve online detection of abnormal state data. Experiments are conducted on the IEEE PHM Challenge 2012 bearing data set and XJTU-TU data set. The proposed method shows much greater susceptibility to incipient faults, and it has fewer false alarms. The robust multi-scale Deep-SVDD hyper sphere model significantly improves the performance of incipient fault detection for rolling bearings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Compared with continuous elements, discontinuous elements advance in processing the discontinuity of physical variables at corner points and discretized models with complex boundaries. However, the computational accuracy of discontinuous elements is sensitive to the positions of element nodes. To reduce the side effect of the node position on the results, this paper proposes employing partially discontinuous elements to compute the time-domain boundary integral equation of 3D elastodynamics. Using the partially discontinuous element, the nodes located at the corner points will be shrunk into the element, whereas the nodes at the non-corner points remain unchanged. As such, a discrete model that is continuous on surfaces and discontinuous between adjacent surfaces can be generated. First, we present a numerical integration scheme of the partially discontinuous element. For the singular integral, an improved element subdivision method is proposed to reduce the side effect of the time step on the integral accuracy. Then, the effectiveness of the proposed method is verified by two numerical examples. Meanwhile, we study the influence of the positions of the nodes on the stability and accuracy of the computation results by cases. Finally, the recommended value range of the inward shrink ratio of the element nodes is provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the quick development of sensor technology in recent years, online detection of early fault without system halt has received much attention in the field of bearing prognostics and health management. While lacking representative samples of the online data, one can try to adapt the previously-learned detection rule to the online detection task instead of training a new rule merely using online data. As one may come across a change of the data distribution between offline and online working conditions, it is challenging to utilize the data from different working conditions to improve detection accuracy and robustness. To solve this problem, a new online detection method of bearing early fault is proposed in this paper based on deep transfer learning. The proposed method contains an offline stage and an online stage. In the offline stage, a new state assessment method is proposed to determine the period of the normal state and the degradation state for whole-life degradation sequences. Moreover, a new deep dual temporal domain adaptation (DTDA) model is proposed. By adopting a dual adaptation strategy on the time convolutional network and domain adversarial neural network, the DTDA model can effectively extract domain-invariant temporal feature representation. In the online stage, each sequentially-arrived data batch is directly fed into the trained DTDA model to recognize whether an early fault occurs. Furthermore, a health indicator of target bearing is also built based on the DTDA features to intuitively evaluate the detection results. Experiments are conducted on the IEEE Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) Challenge 2012 bearing dataset. The results show that, compared with nine state-of-the-art fault detection and diagnosis methods, the proposed method can get an earlier detection location and lower false alarm rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, machine learning techniques have been proven to be a promising tool for early fault detection of rolling bearings. In many actual applications, however, bearing whole-life data are not easy to be historically accumulated, while insufficient data may result in training a detection model that is not good enough. If utilizing the available data under different working conditions to facilitate model training, the data distribution of different bearings are usually quite different, which does not meet the precondition of i n d e p e n d e n t a n d i d e n t i c a l d i s t r i b u t i o n ( i. i. d ) and tends to cause performance reduction. In addition, disturbed by the unstable noise under complex conditions, most of the current detection methods are inclined to raise false alarms, so that the reliability of detection results needs to be improved. To solve these problems, a robust detection method for bearings early fault is proposed based on deep transfer learning. The method includes offline stage and online stage. In the offline stage, by introducing a deep auto-encoder network with domain adaptation, the distribution inconsistency of normal state data among different bearings can be weakened, then the common feature representation of the normal state is obtained. With the extracted common features, a new state assessment method based on the robust deep auto-encoder network is proposed to evaluate the boundary between normal state and early fault state in the low-rank feature space. By training a support vector machine classifier, the detection model is established. In the online stage, along with the data batch arriving sequentially, the features of target bearing are extracted using the common representation learnt in the offline stage, and online detection is conducted by feeding them into the SVM model. Experimental results on IEEE PHM Challenge 2012 bearing dataset and XJTU-SY dataset show that the proposed approach outperforms several state-of-the-art detection methods in terms of detection accuracy and false alarm rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By using signal processing and statistical analysis methods simultaneously, many heterogeneous features can be produced to describe the bearings fault with more comprehensive and discriminant information. At same time, there may exist redundant or irrelevant information which will instead reduce the diagnosis performance. To solve this problem, it is necessary to conduct feature selection which tries to choose the most typical and discriminant features by evaluating their effect on fault status. However, if the structural relationship between features has not been considered well, some similar or redundant features are still probably chosen, which would introduce bias into the final diagnosis model. In this paper, a new fault diagnosis method of bearings based on structural feature selection is proposed to solve the aforementioned problem. Obeying the hypothesis that the features with strong relatedness have close coefficient distance, the proposed method aims to improve diagnosis performance via determining group structure in fault features. First, a new feature selection strategy is proposed by introducing a group identification matrix. Using this matrix, two evaluation criteria about intra-group feature correlation and inter-group feature difference are constructed by means of coefficient's distance. Consequently, we get a multi-objective 0–1 integer programming problem by minimizing intra-group distance and maximizing inter-group distance simultaneously. Second, we use the multi-objective particle swarm optimization algorithm to solve this problem, and then determine the optimal group structure of features adaptively. Finally, a diagnosis model can be trained by support vector machine on the typical features extracted from these groups. Experimental results on four UCI datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed group feature selection strategy. Moreover, the experimental results on two bearing datasets (i.e., CWRU and IMS datasets) demonstrate that the proposed method can identify the inherent group structure in fault features, and then has better diagnosis performance compared with several state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most regression techniques assume that the noise characteristics are subject to single noise distribution whereas the wind speed prediction is difficult to model by the single noise distribution because the noise of wind speed is complicated due to its intermittency and random fluctuations. Therefore, we will present the ν -support vector regression model of Gauss-Laplace mixture heteroscedastic noise (GLM-SVR) and Gauss-Laplace mixture homoscedastic noise (GLMH-SVR) for complex noise. The augmented Lagrange multiplier method is introduced to solve models GLM-SVR and GLMH-SVR. The proposed model is applied to short-term wind speed forecasting using historical data to predict future wind speed at a certain time. The experimental results show that the proposed technique outperforms the single noise technique and obtains good performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]