A Joint Fault Diagnosis and Severity Prediction Framework for Rolling Bearings Using PPCA-EMD and 1DCNN-BiGRU

Rolling bearing fault diagnosis remains challenging due to environmental noise, insufficient information sharing between diagnosis and prediction tasks, and poor model generalization ability. To address these issues, this paper proposes a fault diagnosis and severity prediction method integrating probabilistic principal component analysis (PPCA) and empirical mode decomposition (EMD) with a one-dimensional convolutional neural network (1DCNN) and bidirectional gated recurrent unit (BiGRU). The proposed model consists of two parallel branches for fault diagnosis and fault severity prediction. A self-attention mechanism is integrated into both branches to enhance feature extraction via adaptive feature weighting. In addition, parameter sharing and weighted loss functions are adopted to improve the training efficiency and collaborative learning between the two tasks. PPCA and EMD are employed for signal denoising and reconstruction while preserving fault-related features. Experiments on public datasets and industrial production-line data show that the proposed method improves the fault classification accuracy from 92.43% to 99.71% under different load conditions, while achieving 98.99% accuracy in fault severity prediction. Noise interference tests further demonstrate the effectiveness of the model. A production-line case study further illustrates the feasibility of applying the proposed method to real monitoring signals. These results confirm the effectiveness and practical potential of the proposed method for rolling bearing fault diagnosis and health assessment.