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Vibration analysis for condition assessment and fault diagnostics has a long history of application to power and mechanical equipment. The interpretation and correlation of this data is often cumbersome, even for the most experienced personnel, and thus automated processing and analysis methods are sometimes sought. As such, statistical features are commonly used to provide a measure of the vibration level that can be compared to a threshold value indicative of a failed condition.

Many feature vectors have been developed over the years and are well documented in the literature. What is not clear from the literature is the details associated with each feature so that the results are consistent among users. Preprocessing is vaguely stated and terms, such as “residual signal”, are commonly used yet can mean different techniques. An attempt has been made to define the terms, establish the preprocessing needed for each feature, and provide the details needed to produce consistent results.