Aiming at the problems of inaccurate features extracted and low prediction accuracy in the life prediction of rolling bearings,a method of remaining life prediction of rolling bearings based on hierarchical dispersion entropy (HDE) and gated recurrent unit (GRU) was proposed.Firstly,the time series of vibration signals were analyzed by hierarchical analysis,and the dispersion entropy of each node was calculated,and the dispersion entropy was reconstructed and fused to obtain the HDE.Secondly,correlation,monotonicity and robustness are combined to form a comprehensive index to verify the superiority of HDE.Finally,the training set and test set of HDE are divided,and the life prediction test is carried out by GRU network.The results show that the comprehensive index value of HDE is the best,and the prediction error of the proposed method HDE-GRU is 42.77%,39.57% and 20.24% lower than that of RMS-GRU, DE-GRU and MDE-GRU,respectively.It has the shortest running time and higher prediction accuracy,which provides practical value for rolling bearing health management.