Generally, the health conditions of rotating machinery are complicated and changeable. Meanwhile, its fault labeled information is mostly unknown. Therefore, it is man-sized to automatically capture the useful fault labeled information from the monitoring raw vibration signals. That is to say, the intelligent unsupervised learning approach has a significant influence on fault diagnosis of rotating machinery. In this study, a span-new unsupervised deep learning network can be constructed based on the proposed feature extractor (L12 sparse filtering (L12SF)) and the designed clustering extractor (Weighted Euclidean Affinity Propagation) for resolving the issue that the acquisition of fault sample labeled information is burdensome, yet costly. Naturally, the novel intelligent fault diagnosis method of rotating machinery based on unsupervised deep learning network is first presented in this study. Thereinto, the proposed unsupervised deep learning network consists of two layers of unsupervised feature extractor (L12SF) and one layer of unsupervised clustering (Weighted Euclidean Affinity Propagation). L12SF can improve the regularization performance of sparse filtering, and Weighted Euclidean Affinity Propagation can get rid of the traditional Euclidean distance in affinity propagation that cannot highlight the contribution of different features in fault clustering. To make a long story short, the frequency spectrum signals are first entered into the constructed unsupervised deep learning network for fault feature representation; afterward, the unsupervised feature learning and unsupervised fault classification of rotating machinery can be implemented. The superiority of the proposed algorithms and method is validated by two cases of rolling bearing fault dataset. Ultimately, the proposed unsupervised fault diagnosis method can provide a theoretical basis for the development of intelligent unsupervised fault diagnosis technology for rotating machinery.
