Hydraulic brakes in automobiles play a vital role for the safety on the road; therefore vital components in the brake system should be monitored through condition monitoring techniques. Condition monitoring of brake components can be carried out by using the vibration characteristics. The vibration signals for the different fault conditions of the brake were acquired from the fabricated hydraulic brake test setup using a piezoelectric accelerometer and a data acquisition system. Condition monitoring of brakes was studied using machine learning approaches. Through a feature extraction technique, descriptive statistical features were extracted from the acquired vibration signals. Feature classification was carried out using nested dichotomy, data near balanced nested dichotomy and class balanced nested dichotomy classifiers. A Random forest tree algorithm was used as a base classifier for the nested dichotomy (ND) classifiers. The effectiveness of the suggested techniques was studied and compared. Amongst them, class balanced nested dichotomy (CBND) with the statistical features gives better accuracy of 98.91% for the problem concerned. © 2015, Prognostics and Health Management Society. All Rights Reserved.