DGTL-Net: A Deep Generative Transfer Learning Network for Fault Diagnostics on New Hard Disks

Abstract Intelligent fault diagnosis of hard disks becomes significantly important to guarantee reliability of current cloud-based industrial systems. Most intelligent diagnostic methods are commonly based on assumptions that data from different disks are subject to the same distribution and there are sufficient faulty samples for training the models. However, in reality, there are types of hard disks from different manufacturers and their SMART encoding varies widely across manufacturers. It results in distribution discrepancy among disks and influences the generalization of machine learning methods. Moreover, hard disks usually work in healthy state that faulty events rarely happen on most of them, or especially never occur on new ones. Thus, this paper proposes a deep generative transfer learning network (DGTL-Net) for intelligent fault diagnostics on new hard disks. The DGTL-Net combines the deep generative network that generates fake faulty samples and the deep transfer network that solves the problem of distribution discrepancy between hard disks. An iterative end-end training strategy is also proposed for DGTL-Net to get the most optimal parameters of generative and transfer network simultaneously. Experiments have been conducted to prove that our method achieves better performance.