The shaft and bearing are the most critical components in rotating machinery. Majority of problems arise from faulty bearings in turn affect the shaft. The vibration signals are widely used to determine the condition of machine elements. The vibration signals are used to extract the features to identify the status of a machine. This paper presents the use of c-SVC and nu-SVC models of support vector machine (SVM) with four kernel functions for classification of faults using statistical features extracted from vibration signals under good and faulty conditions of rotational mechanical system. Decision tree algorithm was used to select the prominent features. These features were given as inputs for training and testing the c-SVC and nu-SVC model of SVM and their fault classification accuracies were compared. © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.