Fault diagnosis of rolling bearings based on multiscale permutation entropy and BKA-LSSVM

Abstract Aiming to address the nonlinear and non-stationary characteristics of rolling bearing fault vibration signals, traditional diagnostic methods face challenges such as mode mixing, insufficient feature discrimination, and sensitivity to classifier parameters, which limit further improvements in diagnostic accuracy. This paper proposes a comprehensive optimization framework for fault diagnosis, covering signal decomposition and fault feature classification. First, improved complete ensemble empirical mode decomposition with adaptive noise (ICEEMDAN) is applied to decompose the signal into intrinsic mode functions (IMF), effectively suppressing mode mixing. Next, the correlation coefficient and multiscale permutation entropy (MPE) are employed to quantify the dynamic complexity of each IMF across multiple scales, enabling the extraction of highly discriminative multidimensional feature vectors. Finally, the black-winged kite algorithm (BKA) is used to optimize the penalty factor and kernel parameters of the least squares support vector machine (LSSVM). BKA achieves a dynamic balance between local exploitation and global exploration, and its integration with Cauchy mutation improves robustness to noise, thereby enhancing convergence speed and stability. Experimental results from publicly available datasets and a custom experimental platform show that the proposed approach effectively distinguishes among various fault types, offering superior performance, improved interpretability, and enhanced robustness.