Bearing fault, Impeller fault, seal fault and cavitation are the main causes of breakdown in a mono block centrifugal pump and hence, the detection and diagnosis of these mechanical faults in a mono block centrifugal pump is very crucial for its reliable operation. Based on a continuous acquisition of signals with a data acquisition system, it is possible to classify the faults. This is achieved by the extraction of features from the measured data and employing data mining approaches to explore the structural information hidden in the signals acquired. In the present study, statistical features derived from the vibration data are used as the features. In order to increase the robustness of the classifier and to reduce the data processing load, dimensionality reduction is necessary. In this paper dimensionality reduction is performed using traditional dimensionality reduction techniques and nonlinear dimensionality reduction techniques. The effectiveness of each dimensionality reduction technique is also verified using visual analysis. The reduced feature set is then classified using a decision tree. The results obtained are compared with those generated by classifiers such as Naïve Bayes, Bayes Net and kNN. The effort is to bring out the better dimensionality reduction technique–classifier combination. © 2014 Karabuk University