A hybrid feature selection based on ant colony optimization and probabilistic neural networks for bearing fault diagnostics

This paper presents a novel hybrid feature selection algorithm based on Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) and Probabilistic Neural Networks (PNN). The wavelet packet transform (WPT) was used to process the bearing vibration signals and to generate vibration signal features. Then the hybrid feature selection algorithm was used to select the most relevant features for diagnostic purpose. Experimental results for bearing fault diagnosis have shown that the proposed hybrid feature selection method has greatly improved the diagnostic performance.