Noise-Conditioned Denoising Autoencoder with Temporal Attention for Bearing RUL Prediction

Bearings are important elements of mechanical systems and the correct forecasting of their remaining useful life (RUL) is key to successful predictive maintenance. Nevertheless, noise interference during different operating conditions is also a significant problem in predicting their RUL. Existing denoising-based RUL prediction models often show degraded performance when exposed to heterogeneous and non-stationary noise, resulting in unstable feature extraction and reduced generalisation. To address the challenge of heterogeneous and non-stationary noise in bearing RUL prediction, this study proposes a hybrid framework that combines a noise-conditioned convolutional denoising autoencoder (NC-CDAE) and a temporal attention transformer (TAT). The NC-CDAE adaptively suppresses diverse noise types through conditional modulation, while the TAT captures long-term temporal dependencies to enhance degradation trend learning. This synergistic design improves both the noise robustness and temporal modelling capability of the system. To further validate the model under varying conditions, synthetic datasets with different noise intensities were generated using a conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN). Comprehensive experiments show that the proposed NC-CDAE + TAT framework achieves lower and more stable errors than state-of-the-art methods, reducing RMSE by up to 23.6% and MAE by 18.2% on average and maintaining consistent performance (an RMSE between 0.155 and 0.194) across diverse conditions.