For the last five years, data mining has drawn much attention by researchers and practitioners because of its many applicable domains. This article presents an adaptive decision tree algorithm for dynamically reasoning machine failure cause out of real-time, large-scale machine status database. Among many data mining methods, intelligent decision tree building algorithm is especially of interest in the sense that it enables the automatic generation of decision rules from the tree, facilitating the construction of expert system. On the basis of experiment using semiconductor etching machine, it has been verified that our model outperforms previously proposed decision tree models.