  Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are widely used in fault diagnosis of
mechanical systems due to their powerful feature extraction and classification
capabilities. However, the CNN is a typical black-box model, and the mechanism
of CNN's decision-making are not clear, which limits its application in
high-reliability-required fault diagnosis scenarios. To tackle this issue, we
propose a novel interpretable neural network termed as Time-Frequency Network
(TFN), where the physically meaningful time-frequency transform (TFT) method is
embedded into the traditional convolutional layer as an adaptive preprocessing
layer. This preprocessing layer named as time-frequency convolutional (TFconv)
layer, is constrained by a well-designed kernel function to extract
fault-related time-frequency information. It not only improves the diagnostic
performance but also reveals the logical foundation of the CNN prediction in
the frequency domain. Different TFT methods correspond to different kernel
functions of the TFconv layer. In this study, four typical TFT methods are
considered to formulate the TFNs and their effectiveness and interpretability
are proved through three mechanical fault diagnosis experiments. Experimental
results also show that the proposed TFconv layer can be easily generalized to
other CNNs with different depths. The code of TFN is available on
https://github.com/ChenQian0618/TFN.
