Roller bearing is one of the most widely used rotary elements in a rotary machine. The roller bearing's nature of vibration reveals its condition and the features that show the nature, are to be extracted through some indirect means. Statistical parameters like kurtosis, standard deviation, maximum value, etc. form a set of features, which are widely used in fault diagnostics. Often the problem is, finding out good features that discriminate the different fault conditions of the bearing. Selection of good features is an important phase in pattern recognition and requires detailed domain knowledge. This paper illustrates the use of a Decision Tree that identifies the best features from a given set of samples for the purpose of classification. It uses Proximal Support Vector Machine (PSVM), which has the capability to efficiently classify the faults using statistical features. The vibration signal from a piezoelectric transducer is captured for the following conditions: good bearing, bearing with inner race fault, bearing with outer race fault, and inner and outer race fault. The statistical features are extracted therefrom and classified successfully using PSVM and SVM. The results of PSVM and SVM are compared. © 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.