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Wind turbines (WTs) generally comprise several complex and interconnected systems, such as hub, converter, gearbox, generator, yaw system, pitch system, hydraulic system control system,integration control system, and auxiliary system. Moreover, fault diagnosis plays an important role in ensuring WT safety. In the past decades, machine learning (ML) has showed a powerful capability in fault detection and diagnosis of WTs, thereby remarkably reducing equipment downtime and minimizing financial losses. This study provides a comprehensive review of recent studies on ML methods and techniques for WT fault diagnosis. These studies are classified as supervised, unsupervised, and semi-supervised learning methods. Existing state-of-the-art methods are analyzed and characteristics are discussed. Perspectives on challenges and further directions are also provided.

Aiming at the problem of difficulties in modeling the nonlinear relation in the steam coal dataset, this article proposes a forecasting method for the price of steam coal based on robust regularized kernel regression and empirical mode decomposition. By selecting the polynomial kernel function, the robust loss function and L2 regular term to construct a robust regularized kernel regression model are used. The polynomial kernel function does not depend on the kernel parameters and can mine the global rules in the dataset so that improves the forecasting stability of the kernel model. This method maps the features to the high-dimensional space by using the polynomial kernel function to transform the nonlinear law in the original feature space into linear law in the high-dimensional space and helps learn the linear law in the high-dimensional feature space by using the linear model. The Huber loss function is selected to reduce the influence of abnormal noise in the dataset on the model performance, and the L2 regular term is used to reduce the risk of model overfitting. We use the combined model based on empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and auto regressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model to compensate for the error of robust regularized kernel regression model, thus making up for the limitations of the single forecasting model. Finally, we use the steam coal dataset to verify the proposed model and such model has an optimal evaluation index value compared to other contrast models after the model performance is evaluated as per the evaluation index such as RMSE, MAE, and mean absolute percentage error.

A fault detection method of wind turbine pitch system using semi-supervised optimal margin distribution machine (ssODM) optimized by dynamic state transition algorithm (DSTA) [ssODM-DSTA] was proposed to solve the problem of obtaining the optimal hyperparameters of the fault detection model for the pitch system. This method was adopted to input the three hyperparameters of the ssODM into the dynamic state transition algorithm in the form of a three-dimensional vector to obtain the global optimal hyperparameters of the model, thus improving the performance of the fault detection model. Using a random forest to rank the priority of features of the pitch system fault data, the features with large weight proportions were retained. Then, the Pearson correlation method is used to analyze the degree of correlation among features, filter redundant features, and reduce the scale of features. The dataset was divided into a training dataset and a test dataset to train and test the proposed fault detection model, respectively. The real-time wind turbine pitch system fault data were collected from domestic wind farms to carry out fault detection experiments. The results have shown that the proposed method had a positive fault rate (FPR) and fault negative rate (FNR), compared with other optimization algorithms.

Aiming at the problem of unbalanced data categories of UHV converter valve fault data, a method for UHV converter valve fault detection based on optimization cost-sensitive extreme random forest is proposed. The misclassification cost gain is integrated into the extreme random forest decision tree as a splitting index, and the inertia weight and learning factor are improved to construct an improved particle swarm optimization algorithm. First, feature extraction and data cleaning are carried out to solve the problems of local data loss, large computational load, and low real-time performance of the model. Then, the classifier training based on the optimization cost-sensitive extreme random forest is used to construct a fault detection model, and the improved particle swarm optimization algorithm is used to output the optimal model parameters, achieving fast response of the model and high classification accuracy, good robustness, and generalization under unbalanced data. Finally, in order to verify its effectiveness, this model is compared with the existing optimization algorithms. The running speed is faster and the fault detection performance is higher, which can meet the actual needs.

Aiming at the problem of class imbalance in the wind turbine blade bolts operation-monitoring dataset, a fault detection method for wind turbine blade bolts based on Gaussian Mixture Model–Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique–Gaussian Mixture Model (GSG) combined with Cost-Sensitive LightGBM (CS-LightGBM) was proposed. Since it is difficult to obtain the fault samples of blade bolts, the GSG oversampling method was constructed to increase the fault samples in the blade bolt dataset. The method obtains the optimal number of clusters through the BIC criterion, and uses the GMM based on the optimal number of clusters to optimally cluster the fault samples in the blade bolt dataset. According to the density distribution of fault samples in inter-clusters, we synthesized new fault samples using SMOTE in an intra-cluster. This retains the distribution characteristics of the original fault class samples. Then, we used the GMM with the same initial cluster center to cluster the fault class samples that were added to new samples, and removed the synthetic fault class samples that were not clustered into the corresponding clusters. Finally, the synthetic data training set was used to train the CS-LightGBM fault detection model. Additionally, the hyperparameters of CS-LightGBM were optimized by the Bayesian optimization algorithm to obtain the optimal CS-LightGBM fault detection model. The experimental results show that compared with six models including SMOTE-LightGBM, CS-LightGBM, K-means-SMOTE-LightGBM, etc., the proposed fault detection model is superior to the other comparison methods in the false alarm rate, missing alarm rate and F1-score index. The method can well realize the fault detection of large wind turbine blade bolts.

As one of the key components of wind turbines, gearboxes are under complex alternating loads for a long time, and the safety and reliability of the whole machine are often affected by the failure of internal gears and bearings. Aiming at the difficulty of optimizing the parameters of wind turbine gearbox fault detection models based on extreme random forest, a fault detection model with extreme random forest optimized by the improved butterfly optimization algorithm (IBOA-ERF) is proposed. The algebraic sum of the false alarm rate and the missing alarm rate of the fault detection model is constructed as the fitness function, and the initial position and position update strategy of the individual are improved. A chaotic mapping strategy is introduced to replace the original population initialization method to enhance the randomness of the initial population distribution. An adaptive inertia weight factor is proposed, combined with the landmark operator of the pigeon swarm optimization algorithm to update the population position iteration equation to speed up the convergence speed and improve the diversity and robustness of the butterfly optimization algorithm. The dynamic switching method of local and global search stages is adopted to achieve dynamic balance between global exploration and local search, and to avoid falling into local optima. The ERF fault detection model is trained, and the improved butterfly optimization algorithm is used to obtain optimal parameters to achieve fast response of the proposed model with good robustness and generalization under high-dimensional data. The experimental results show that, compared with other optimization algorithms, the proposed fault detection method of wind turbine gearboxes has a lower false alarm rate and missing alarm rate.

A fault diagnosis method for wind turbine gearboxes based on undersampling, XGBoost feature selection, and improved whale optimization-random forest (IWOA-RF) was proposed for the problem of high false negative and false positive rates in wind turbine gearboxes. Normal samples of raw data were subjected to undersampling first, and various features and data labels in the raw data were provided with importance analysis by XGBoost feature selection to select features with higher label correlation. Two parameters of random forest algorithm were optimized via the whale optimization algorithm to create a fitness function with the false negative rate (FNR) and false positive rate (FPR) as evaluation indexes. Then, the minimum fitness function value within the given scope of parameters was found. The WOA was controlled by the hyper-parameter α to optimize the step size. This article uses the variant form of the sigmoid function to alter the change trend of the WOA hyper-parameter α from a linear decline to a rapid decline first and then a slow decline to allow the WOA to be optimized. In the initial stage, a larger step size and step size change rate can make the model progress to the optimization target faster, while in the later stage of optimization, a smaller step size and step size change rate allows the model to more accurately find the minimum value of the fitness function. Finally, two hyper-parameters, corresponding to the minimum fitness function value, were substituted into a random forest algorithm for model training. The results showed that the method proposed in this paper can significantly reduce the false negative and false positive rates compared with other optimization classification methods.

It is difficult to optimize the fault model parameters when Extreme Random Forest is used to detect the electric pitch system fault model of the double-fed wind turbine generator set. Therefore, Extreme Random Forest which was optimized by improved grey wolf algorithm (IGWO-ERF) was proposed to solve the problems mentioned above. First, IGWO-ERF imports the Cosine model to nonlinearize the linearly changing convergence factor α to balance the global exploration and local exploitation capabilities of the algorithm. Then, in the later stage of the algorithm iteration, α wolf generates its mirror wolf based on the lens imaging learning strategy to increase the diversity of the population and prevent local optimum of the population. The electric pitch system fault detection method of the wind turbine generator set sets the generator power of the variable pitch system as the main state parameter. First, it uses the Pearson correlation coefficient method to eliminate the features with low correlation with the electric pitch system generator power. Then, the remaining features are ranked by the importance of the RF features. Finally, the top N features are selected to construct the electric pitch system fault data set. The data set is divided into a training set and a test set. The training set is used to train the proposed fault detection model, and the test set is used for testing. Compared with other parameter optimization algorithms, the proposed method has lower FNR and FPR in the electric pitch system fault detection of the wind turbine generator set.