In this present work aims to formulate an automated prediction model using vibration signals of various gear operating conditions by using EMD (empirical mode decomposition) and spectral features and different classification algorithms. In this present work empirical mode decomposition (EMD) is a signal processing technique used to extract more useful fault information from the vibration signals. The proposed method described in following parts gear test rig, data acquisition system, signal processing, feature extraction and classification algorithms and finally identification. Meanwhile, in order to remove the redundant and irrelevant spectral features and classification algorithms, data mining is implemented and it showed promising prediction results. © 2017 Published under licence by IOP Publishing Ltd.