This paper gives an overview of the various approaches to designing statistical pattern recognition scheme based on Bayes discrimination rule and the artificial neural networks for rotating machine condition classification. Concerning to Bayes discrimination rule, this paper contains the linear discrimination rule applied to classification into several multivariate normal distributions with common covariance matrices, the quadratic discrimination rule under different covariance matrices. Also we discribes k-nearest neighbor method to directly estimate a posterior probability of each class. Five features are extracted in time domain vibration signals. Employing these five features, statistical pattern classifier and neural networks have been established to detect defects on rotating machine. Four different cases of rotation machine were observed. The effects of k number and neural networks structures on monitoring performance have also been investigated. For the comparison of diagnosis performance of these two method, their recognition success rates are calculated form the test data. The result of experiment which classifies the rotating machine conditions using each method presents that the neural networks shows the highest recognition rate.