1
Time-Frequency Complexity Based Remaining
Useful Life (RUL) Estimation for Bearing Faults
Rodney K. Singleton II, Elias G. Strangas and Selin Aviyente
AbstractReliable operation of electrical machines depends
on the timely detection and diagnosis of faults as well as on
prognosis, i.e. estimating the remaining useful life (RUL) of
the components. Bearings are the most common components in
rotary machines and usually constitute a large portion of the
failure cases in these machines. Although there has been a lot
of work in the study of bearing life failure mechanisms and
modeling, the problem is still far from being solved. In this
paper, we introduce a time-frequency feature extraction based
method for estimating remaining useful life of bearings from
vibration signals. The proposed approach extracts measures that
quantify the complexity of time-frequency surfaces corresponding
to vibration signals. The extracted features are then tracked
through the life time of a bearing using curve fitting and Extended
Kalman Filtering algorithms. The proposed methodology is tested
on a publicly available bearing data set with known RULs.
Index TermsBearing Faults, Prognosis, Remaining Useful
Life, Time-Frequency Analysis, Entropy, Extended Kalman Filter
I. I NTRODUCTION
The ability to accurately predict the remaining useful life
of electromechanical systems is critical for affordable system
operation and can also be used to enhance system safety.
The theme of condition-based maintenance (CBM) is that
maintenance is performed based on an assessment or pre-
diction of the component health instead of its service time,
which achieves objectives of cost reduction and safety en-
hancement. If one can predict the degradation of a component
before it actually fails, then it will provide ample time for
maintenance engineers to schedule a repair, and to acquire
replacement components before the components actually fail.
Bearings are of paramount importance to almost all forms of
rotating machinery, and are among the most common machine
elements. The failures of bearing without warning will result
in catastrophic consequences in many situations, such as in
helicopters, transportation vehicles, etc. Most of the current
maintenance procedure includes periodic visual inspections
and replacement of the components at fixed time intervals.
According to early surveys bearing faults represent the most
common cause for mechanical failure. Consequently, majority
of the proposed fault detection methods are focused on detect-
ing bearing faults. Despite such a variety of approaches, most
of them focus on extracting a set of well-established features
that indicate bearing surface faults.
R. K. Singleton, E. G. Strangas and S. Aviyente are with the Department of
Electrical and Computer Engineering, Michigan State University, East Lans-
ing, MI 48824, USA (e-mail: strangas@egr.msu.edu; aviyente@egr.msu.edu).
This material is based in part upon work supported by the National Science
Foundation under Grant No. EECS-1102316 and by the National Science
Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship under Grant No. DGE-0802267.
600
978-1-4799-0025-1/13/$31.00 2013 IEEE
Much work has been done on the diagnosis of bearing faults
using data-driven and model-based methods, such as Hidden
Markov Modeling and Particle Filtering. It has been shown
that by using current signals you can detect the presence of
a fault in the bearing as well as diagnose the severity [16],
[20]. Further work has been done on the prognosis of bearing
faults in order to obtain the Remaining Useful Life (RUL)
of bearings, or motors in general. Particle Filters have also
been used for the prognosis of fault severity [2], [5], [7],
[13]. However, one drawback of using particle filtering is
that you must have a reliable physical model for the fault
degradation. For most real- life signals and systems, including
bearings, a reliable physical model for the degradation process
is not available. Kalman Filtering has also been used for
fault diagnosis and prognosis, using an n-step ahead Kalman
Predictor for data extrapolation [12], [14].
Particularly, with bearing fault analysis, vibration data is
used over current signal since vibration data is more robust to
operating conditions. Previous studies have shown that bear-
ing diagnostics can also be performed using current signals,
but only at certain frequency rates [8]. In this paper, we
propose a data-driven method for estimating the remaining
useful life of bearings from accelerometer recordings. The
proposed method relies on extraction of features from time-
frequency distribution of the vibration signals as the signals
are nonstationary in nature. The extracted features, entropy and
concentration, quantify the spread of the energy across time
and frequency and relies on the observation that the vibration
signals become more chaotic or impulsive as the severity of
the fault progresses. The extracted features are then used by
Extended Kalman Filtering to build a degradation model and
determine a threshold value for the features from training
data. This threshold is then applied to testing data to estimate
the RUL as well as a confidence interval associated with the
estimated RUL.
II. BACKGROUND
A. Time-Frequency Analysis
In literature, different time-frequency transform methods
have been proposed for the analysis of nonstationary sig-
nals [4]. The most common approaches include the Short-
Time Fourier Transform (STFT), Wigner Distribution, wavelet
transform and Cohens class of time-frequency distributions.
Cohens class of distributions are bilinear time-frequency
distributions (TFDs) that are expressed as 1 [4]:
1 All integrals are from to unless otherwise stated.
 2

T
Pk|k1 = Fk1 Pk1|k1 Fk1 + Qk1 (6)
(, )s(u + 2 )
RRR
C(t, ) = (1) The estimate is then updated
j(ut )
s (u 2 )e du d d, yk = zk h(xk|k1 ) (7)
where the function (, ) is the kernel function and s is the
Sk = Hk Pk|k1 HkT + Rk (8)
signal. TFDs represent the energy distribution of a signal over
time and frequency, simultaneously. The kernel completely Kk = Pk|k1 HkT Sk1 (9)
determines the properties of the corresponding TFD.
The major differences between Cohens class of TFDs xk|k = xk|k1 + Kk yk (10)
compared to other time-frequency representations such as the
wavelet transform are the nonlinearity of the distribution, Pk|k = Pk|k1 Kk Hk Pk|k1 (11)
energy preservation and the uniform resolution over time and where Fk and Hk are the local linearizations of the state
frequency. The wavelet transform provides a representation transition and observation model, respectively, given by:
over time and scale where the frequency resolution is high at 
low frequencies and low at high frequencies. Although this f 
Fk1 = (12)
property makes wavelet transform attractive in detecting high x xk1|k1 ,uk1
frequency transients in a given signal, it inherently imposes a 
non-uniform time-frequency tiling on the analyzed signal and h 
Hk = (13)
thus results in biased energy representations. Cohens class of
bilinear TFDs on the other hand assumes uniform resolution
over the entire time-frequency plane. One popular member of
Cohens class of distributions is Choi-Williams distribution,
which offers both high time-frequency resolution and reduced
interference for multi-component signals. The Choi-Williams
distribution of a signal s(t) is defined as:
(, )s(u + 2 )s (u 2 )
RRR
C(t, ) = (2)
ej(ut )du d d,
2
where (, ) = exp( ( ) ) is the kernel function that application of information-theoretic measures such as entropy
acts as a filter on the signals autocorrelation function. This
distribution can be thought of as a filtered/smoothed version
of the Wigner distribution and the amount of smoothing is
controlled by . This smoothing removes the cross-terms seen
in the Wigner distribution at the expense of reduced resolution.
B. Extended Kalman Filter
Kalman Filters have been used to estimate the state of a
system given a finite-length data stream. However, Kalman
Filters are only useful for linear degradation models with
additive white noise. This proves to be very disadvantageous
since most signals in engineering are non-linear. The Extended
Kalman Filter (EKF) proposes a solution to this problem
by approximating the state using a local linearization of a
nonlinear function [6]. In the EKF, the state transition and
observation models must be differentiable but not necessarily
linear functions.
xk = f (xk1 , uk1 ) + wk1 (3)
zk = h(xk ) + vk (4)
where xk is the state, zk is the observaion, uk is the input at
time sample k, f and h are the nonlinear functions, with wk
and vk being zero-mean, Gaussian noise with some covariance
matrices Qk and Rk , respectively. Prediction of the state is
computed via the following:
xk|k1 = f (xk1|k1 , uk1 ) (5)
601
x xk|k1
It is also important to note that the p(xk |z1:k ) is approximated
by a Gaussian distribution.
C. Information Theoretic Measures on the Time-Frequency
Plane
In recent years, there has been an interest in adapting
information-theoretic measures to the time-frequency plane in
order to quantify signal complexity [1], [3], [10], [19]. The
and divergence have made it easier to quantify the complexity
of non-stationary signals on the time-frequency plane as well
as differentiate between different signals. These measures have
been shown to be effective in quantifying the number of signal
components. Some of the most desired properties of TFDs are
the energy preservation and the marginals. They are given as
follows and are satisfied when (, 0) = (0, ) = 1 , .
Z Z Z Z
C(t, ) dt d = |s(t)|2 dt = |S()|2 d
Z Z
C(t, ) d = |s(t)| , C(t, ) dt = |S()|2 .
2
(14)
The formulas given above evoke an analogy between a TFD
and the probability density function (pdf) of a two-dimensional
random variable. This analogy has inspired the adaptation of
information-theoretic measures such as entropy to the time-
frequency plane. The main difference between TFDs and
pdfs is that TFDs are not always positive and thus, not all
information measures are well-defined on the time-frequency
plane. Another important point is that distributions have to be
normalized by their energy before applying any information
theoretic measures on them.
The well-known Shannon entropy as applied to TFDs can
be defined as:
Z Z
H(C) = C(t, ) log C(t, )dt d. (15)
 3

This measure is not well-defined when the time-frequency dis- Horizontal Raw Vibration Data
4
tribution takes on a negative value and can only be applied to

Acceleration
positive distributions such as the spectrogram. For this reason, 2

generalized entropy measures such as Renyi entropy have been 0

considered for quantifying the information content of signals 2

0 0.02 0.04 0.06 0.08 0.1
on the time-frequency plane [15]. Renyis generalized entropy Time (s)
Vertical Raw Vibration Data
of order for TFDs is: 2

Acceleration
1

0
1
Z Z
Z Z C(t, )

H (C) = log2 dt d 1
1
C(u, v)du dv 2
0 0.02 0.04 0.06 0.08 0.1
Time (s)
(16)
where > 0 is theRorder
R of Renyi entropy, and entropy is well- Fig. 1. Raw Data of Initial Vibration Signal
defined as long as C (t, )dt d > 0. This condition does
not require the TFDs to be positive for all time and frequency Horizontal Raw Vibration Data
points, and is well-defined for a large class of distributions 4

Acceleration
and signals [3]. As 1, Renyi entropy approaches the 2

0
well-known Shannon entropy. Since in actual implementations
2
we are interested in the discrete-time implementation of this
4
measure, we will define Renyi entropy in discrete time- 0 0.01 0.02 0.03 0.04 0.05
Time (s)
0.06 0.07 0.08 0.09 0.1

frequency domain as: 2

Vertical Raw Vibration Data

 1

Acceleration
1 XX C[n, k]
H (C) = log2 P P
+ (17) 0

1 n n k C[n , k ]
1
k 2

log2 t 3
0 0.01 0.02 0.03 0.04 0.05 0.06 0.07 0.08 0.09 0.1
Time (s)
where t and are the sampling step size in time and
frequency, respectively. Fig. 2. Raw Data of Intermediate Vibration Signal
Another measure that is commonly used to quantify the
spread of the signals in the time-frequency plane is the
concentration measure. Contrary to the entropy, concentration was significant energy in the frequency range of 160-200 Hz.
measure is a statistic on how concentrated a signal is in the As the severity of the fault increased, this band moved up
time-frequency plane and is given below: in frequency, around frequency band 236-256 Hz. Finally, as
!p the motor neared failure state, the concentration of energy
M [Cnorm [n, k]] =
XX 1
|Cnorm [n, k]| p (18) distributed itself across the entire plot, in a less uniform
n k
manner. The progression of the faults, from the first sample,
to an intermediate, then finally the last, or failure sample, can
where p > 1, and Cnorm [n, k] must be a probability distribu- be seen in figures 1 - 3, for the raw signals, and figures 4 - 6
tion function characterized by in the time-frequency domain, respectively.
C [n, k] Based on these observations, we quantify the spread of
Cnorm [n, k] = P P (19) energy in the time-frequency plane using the entropy and
n k C [n, k]
concentration measures. Since over time, the time frequency
where C[n,k] is the original TFD. Furthermore, p < 4 is energy distribution plot goes from a uniform distribution
chosen since higher values of p will emphasize the small
energy regions in the TFD [17]. This paper uses p = 2.
Horizontal Raw Vibration Data
40
III. M ETHOD
Acceleration

20

A. Feature Extraction 0

The vibration signals (see Figs. 1-3) were first transformed 20

40
into the time-frequency plane using the Choi-Williams dis- 0 0.02 0.04 0.06 0.08 0.1
Time (s)
tribution. Each sample, which is of variable length, was Vertical Raw Vibration Data
40
transformed into the time-frequency (TF) domain with a 256
Acceleration

20
point FFT. By looking at the transformed signals, we observed 0
that the horizontal accelerometer was more informative of the 20

progression of the fault compared to the vertical one (See 40

0 0.02 0.04 0.06 0.08 0.1
Figs. 4 - 6). For the horizontal accelerometer data, a clear Time (s)

trend in the time-frequency distribution across all 6 data sets

was observed. At the beginning of each training run, there Fig. 3. Raw Data of Final Vibration Signal

602
 4

Horizontal Vibrations
0.2
to track the parameters as well as the overall state, by allowing
240

Frequency (Hz) 200 0.1

x = [x, ] [9].
160

120
0
[xk , k ] = f ([xk1 , k1 ], uk1 ) + wk1 (20)
80
0.1
40

500 1000 1500 2000 2500

0.2 where is the set of all parameters in the equation. It is also
Time (samples)

Vertical Vibrations
assumed that
240
0.1
k = k1 + nk (21)
200
Frequency (Hz)

0.05

160

120
0 where nk is some zero-mean, Gaussian noise with a covariance
80

40
0.05 Mk . Once the parameters of the model are obtained, the value
500 1000 1500 2000 2500
0.1 of the parametric prediction model, obtained through EKF,
Time (samples)
at the failure sample is extracted as the threshold, . The
threshold is extracted from each training set individually and
Fig. 4. Choi-WIlliams Transformation of Initial Vibration Signal
then the final threshold for testing is computed as the average
across training sets
Horizontal Vibrations
0.2
240 K
200
0.15
1 X
0.1
= i
Frequency (Hz)

160 0.05 (22)

120
0 K i=1
0.05
80
0.1
40 0.15

0.2
where K is the number of training samples, equal to 6 in this
500 1000 1500 2000 2500
Time (samples) case.
Vertical Vibrations
240
0.1
In order to predict the RUL of the bearing, the time it will
200 0.05
take to reach the failure threshold, , is computed. At each
Frequency (Hz)

160

120
0
sample, k, the degradation equation found by EKF, g k (k ) is
80

40
0.05
computed by plugging in the estimated parameters, k . Using
0.1

g k (k ) =
500 1000 1500 2000 2500
Time (samples)
(23)

Fig. 5. Choi-WIlliams Transformation of Intermediate Vibration Signal

to a more impulsive distribution near failure state, entropy
and concentration measures are suitable. The measures were
extracted over selected frequency bands across the samples.
Four different frequency bands, 160-200 Hz, 236-256 Hz, 0-
40 Hz, and the entire surface 0-256 Hz were considered.
B. Fault Prognosis and RUL Prediction
The extracted features are tracked across time using the
Extended Kalman Filter (EKF). First, the trend of the feature
across training samples is approximated by an analytical
signal, such as a linear, quadratic, or exponential model.
Once such an approximation is found, EKF can be used to
estimate the parameters of the model by altering equation (3)
240
Horizontal Vibrations
0.2
200
Frequency (Hz)
we can solve for k . The RUL, then, simply becomes
RU L(k) = k k (24)
C. Confidence Intervals of RULs
The main focus of this paper is to not only obtain RUL infor-
mation, but to add confidence to the prediction based on how
likely the prediction is. By the end of the algorithm, we have
obtained RUL estimates {RU L(1), RU L(2), ..., RU L(N )},
where N is the number of samples in the test data. From
these estimates, we can build a histogram for each test case
and feature separately. Confidence intervals are then given in
the 95% level rounded to the nearest hundred. This gives the
user time estimates in which the motor will fail as well as
the likelihood of the bearing failing around a range of time
centered at the RUL estimate [18]. This feature is useful to
the user because there may be some outlying RUL predictions
which may not be realistic. These outliers will have a low
probability of occurring and the user will be notified about
it. For example, in the initial stages of testing the estimated

0.1

160

120
0
RULs based on just a few sample points may not be very
80
0.1 reliable. Similarly, towards the end of the lifetime of the
40

500 1000 1500 2000 2500

0.2 bearing, the accelerometer samples may be noisy making the
Time (samples)

Vertical Vibrations
extracted features unreliable. The RUL predictions with the
240
0.1
highest probabilities will be provided to the user.
200
Frequency (Hz)

0.05

160
0
120

80
IV. DATA
0.05
40

500 1000 1500 2000 2500

0.1
In this paper, the data provided by FEMTO-ST Institute
Time (samples)
(Besancon - France, http: //www.femto-st.fr/) was used. Ex-
periments were carried out on a laboratory experimental plat-
Fig. 6. Choi-WIlliams Transformation of Final Vibration Signal form (PRONOSTIA) that enables accelerated degradation of
603
 5

Entropy of "Healthy" Band Training Set 1 Entropy of "Healthy" Band Training Set 2
12 11

10.8
10
10.6

10.4
8
10.2

Entropy

Entropy
6 10

9.8
4
9.6

9.4
2
9.2

0 9
0 500 1000 1500 2000 2500 3000 0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900
Time (samples) Time (samples)

(a) Training Set 1 (b) Training Set 2

Entropy of "Healthy" Band Training Set 3 Entropy of "Healthy" Band Training Set 4
11.5 11

11 10.5

10
10.5

9.5
10

Entropy

Entropy
9
9.5
8.5
Fig. 7. Overview of PRONOSTIA set up 9
8

8.5
7.5

8 7

bearings under constant and/or variable operating conditions, 7.5

0 200 400
Time (samples)
600 800 1000
6.5
0 100 200 300 400
Time (samples)
500 600 700 800

while gathering online health monitoring data (rotating speed,

(c) Training Set 3 (d) Training Set 4
load force, temperature, vibration). PRONOSTIA is an exper-
Entropy of "Healthy" Band Training Set 5 Entropy of "Healthy" Band Training Set 6
imentation platform dedicated to test and validate bearings 11.5 11.5

fault detection, diagnostic and prognostic approaches. The 11

11

main objective of PRONOSTIA is to provide real experimental 10.5

10.5

Entropy

Entropy
data that characterize the degradation of ball bearings along 10

10

their whole operational life (until their total failure). Data 9.5

9.5

representing 3 different loads were considered (rotating speed 9

and load force): First operating conditions: 1800 rpm and 4000 8.5
0 100 200 300
Time (samples)
400 500 600
9
0 200 400 600 800 1000
Time (samples)
1200 1400 1600 1800

N; second operating conditions: 1650 rpm and 4200 N; third (e) Training Set 5 (f) Training Set 6
operating conditions: 1500 rpm and 5000 N. 6 run-to-failure
datasets were used to build the prognostics models, and the 11 Fig. 8. Median filtered entropy over the healthy band across all 6 training
sets
remaining bearings were used for testing. The characterization
of the bearings degradation is based on two data types of Concentration
3
x 10
6 Measure of "Healthy" Band Training Set 1 Concentration
x 10
2.4
5 Measure of "Healthy" Band Training Set 2

sensors: vibration and temperature. In this paper, we are 2.5

2.2

only using the data from the vibration sensor for prognosis.
Concentration Measure

Concentration Measure
2
2

The vibration sensors consist of two miniature accelerometers 1.5

1.8

positioned at 900 to each other; the first is placed on the 1

1.6

1.4
vertical axis and the second is placed on the horizontal axis. 0.5
1.2

The two accelerometers are placed radially on the external 0 1

0 500 1000 1500 2000 2500 3000 0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900

race of the bearing. The acceleration measures are sampled at Time (samples) Time (samples)

25.6 kHz [11]. An overview of the entire PRONOSTIA set up (a) Training Set 1 (b) Training Set 2
can be found in figure 7. Concentration
3
x 10
5 Measure of "Healthy" Band Training Set 3 Concentration
x 10
5
5 Measure of "Healthy" Band Training Set 4

2.8
4.5
2.6

V. R ESULTS 4
Concentration Measure

Concentration Measure

2.4
3.5
2.2

For the selected frequency bands of 160-200 Hz, 236- 2 3

256 Hz, 0-40 Hz, and 0-256 Hz, the two features discussed 1.8

1.6
2.5

above, entropy and concentration measure, were extracted for 1.4

1.5
1.2

each recorded sample. Median filtering was performed for 1

0 200 400 600 800 1000
1
0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800
Time (samples) Time (samples)
smoothing the features using a window size of 3, determined
empirically. Out of all the features that were tested, the feature (c) Training Set 3 (d) Training Set 4
Concentration Measure of "Healthy" Band Training Set 5 Concentration Measure of "Healthy" Band Training Set 6
that had the clearest trend across samples was entropy (See x 10
3.5
5
x 10
2.8
5

2.6
Figs. 8 and 9), and in particular, the entropy of the 160-200 3
2.4
Concentration Measure

Concentration Measure

Hz band. Across all 6 training sets, this feature looks to have a 2.5
2.2

2
linear degradation trend which the EKF parameter estimation 1.8
2

method can exploit. Median filtering was also performed for 1.6

1.4

smoothing the features using a window size of 3, determined 1.5

1.2

empirically. However, the entropy over the 160-200 Hz band 1

0 100 200 300
Time (samples)
400 500 600
1
0 200 400 600 800 1000
Time (samples)
1200 1400 1600 1800

is not exactly linear as seen in figure 10. For feature data

(e) Training Set 5 (f) Training Set 6
extrapolation, two different analytical models were viewed:
linear and exponential. The results of the RUL estimations Fig. 9. Median filtered concentration measure over the healthy band across
over the 11 testing sets can be found in Table 1. all 6 training sets

604
 6

TABLE I degradation curve for a nonlinear phenomenon. Furthermore,

RUL E STIMATIONS AND PDF the RUL estimates at each time point should not be weighted
Test Set True RUL (s) Est. RUL (s) Confidence Int. Error
the same since there is less data and more uncertainty at
1 5730 N/A N/A N/A the initial samples. This made it difficult to perform RUL
2 339 1422.5 [200, 1800] 319.62% predictions. Even though the RUL estimation error is high for
3 1610 1117.9 [400, 2300] 30.57%
4 1460 3721.4 [1300, 6800] 154.8%
certain test cases, in all of the cases the true RUL lies within
5 7570 11734.4 [7300, 13000] 55.01% the 95% confidence interval computed from the distribution
6 7530 6608.6 [6000, 8400] 12.24% of the estimated RULs. This indicates that not all RUL
7 1390 2691.3 [1200, 3100] 93.62%
8 3090 3678.9 [2800, 4200] 19.06%
estimates should be equally weighted and the actual estimate
9 1290 4367.8 [1200, 6900] 238.5% should rather be an interval or a weighted mean based on the
10 N/A 580 N/A N/A reliabilities of each predicted RUL value.
11 N/A 820 N/A N/A

VI. C ONCLUSIONS
11
Estimated
In this paper, we presented a new method for RUL estima-
10.5
Actual
tion from bearing data. The proposed method uses complexity
based features in the time-frequency plane to predict RUL for
10 bearings as well as to provide how likely a particular outcome
is. These RUL notifications, however, are dependent on the
Entropy

9.5
extracted features. The methodology requires the extraction of
9 a feature that resembles or can be modeled by an analytical
signal across time. This proves to be problematic as the
8.5
trajectory of the extracted fault is not always a monotonic
8
function and may show fluctuations which makes it harder
0 200 400 600 800 1000 1200
Sample Number to fit an analytic signal model. For future work, model-free
techniques will be examined to compensate for this drawback.
Fig. 10. Linear EKF Parameter Estimation for Bearing 1 5 Furthermore, performing prognosis using multiple features
instead of one may prove to be more beneficial and improve
the reliability of the RUL estimates. Moreover, alternative
Out of 11 testing datasets, 3 of them were deemed to already ways of selecting the threshold, other than the mean, can
be in failure state because at the time of RUL estimation, improve the robustness of the method. The proposed method
the feature was already below the threshold value. These can also be applied to other types of sensor data such as the
cases are marked as N/A, or not attainable. For the remaining current from the bearings.
testing sets, the RUL estimation and corresponding confidence
intervals were calculated. In particular, we can see the results R EFERENCES
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VII. B IOGRAPHIES
Rodney K. Singleton II received his B.S. in electrical en-
gineering with honors from Michigan State University (MSU)
in East Lansing, Michigan in 2010. During his undergradu-
ate career, he completed summer internships at Ford Motor
Company and The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics
Laboratory. Currently, he is pursuing his M.S. and Ph.D. in
Electrical Engineering, also at MSU, as a GEM and NSF
fellow. His graduate research includes the prognosis of bearing
faults in electrical motors, as well as remaining useful life
estimation of a motor.

Selin Aviyente received her B.S. degree with high hon-

ors in electrical and electronics engineering from Bogazici
University, Istanbul in 1997. She received her M.S. and
Ph.D. degrees, both in Electrical Engineering: Systems, from
the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1999 and 2002,
respectively. In August 2002, she joined the Department
of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Michigan State
University where she is currently an associate professor. Her
research focuses on the theory and applications of statistical
signal processing, in particular non-stationary signal analysis.
She is interested in developing methods for efficient signal
representation, detection and classification. She has published
over 80 refereed journal articles and conference proceedings
on time-frequency analysis, signal detection and classification.
She is the recipient of 2005 Withrow Teaching Excellence
Award and 2008 NSF CAREER Award.

Elias Strangas received the Dipl. Eng. degree in electrical

engineering from the National Technical University of Greece,
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