An interpretable multiscale lifting wavelet contrast network for planetary gearbox fault diagnosis with small samples

Previous deep learning-based fault diagnosis methods for planetary gearbox require numerous training samples and lack the necessary interpretability. Aiming at the problems of insufficient interpretability of deep models and the absence of feature mining capability with small samples, this study presents an interpretable multiscale lifting wavelet contrast network for planetary gearbox fault diagnosis. First, an interpretable multiscale lifting wavelet network is designed to achieve comprehensive and credible features mining from fault signals. Secondly, an interactive channel attention mechanism is constructed to choose feature maps with different frequency components. It can further confirm the interpretability of the lifting wavelet layer while improving the accuracy of the model. Finally, a time-frequency contrast loss is designed to simultaneously optimizing the distribution of time-frequency domain features. The effectiveness and interpretability of the model are analyzed through various visualization approaches. Experimental results on two planetary gearbox datasets indicate that our method is an interpretable and effective fault recognition method with small samples, and it holds a promising future for engineering applications.