Abstract
To address the issue of low efficiency in feature extraction and model training when traditional deep learning methods handle long time-series data, this paper proposes a Time-Series Lightweight Transformer (TSL-Transformer) model. According to the data characteristics of bearing fault diagnosis tasks, the model makes lightweight improvements to the traditional Transformer model, and focuses on adjusting the encoder module (core feature extraction module), introducing multi-head attention mechanism and feedforward neural network to efficiently extract complex features of vibration signals. Considering the rich temporal features present in vibration signals, a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) module is introduced in parallel to the encoder module of the improved lightweight Transformer model. This enhancement further strengthens the model's ability to capture temporal features, thereby improving diagnostic accuracy. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed TSL-Transformer model achieves a fault diagnosis accuracy of 99.2% on the CWRU dataset. Through dimensionality reduction and visualization analysis using the t-SNE method, the effectiveness of different network structures within the proposed TSL-Transformer model is elucidated.