This study was carried out for the reliability of PD(Partial Discharge) pattern recognition. For the pattern recognition, the database for PD was established by use of self-designed insulation defects which occur and were mostly critical in GIS(Gas Insulated Switchgear). The acquired database was analyzed to distinguish patterns by means of PRPD(Phase Resolved Partial Discharge) method and stored to the form with to unite the average amplitude of PD pulse and the number of PD pulse as the input data of neural network. In order to prove the performance of genetic algorithm combined with neural network, the neural networks with trial-and-error method and the neural network with genetic algorithm were trained by same training data and compared to the results of their pattern recognition rate. As a result, the recognition success rate of defects was 93.2% and the neural network train process by use of trial-and-error method was very time consuming. The recognition success rate of defects, on the other hand, was 100% by applying the genetic algorithm at neural network and it took a relatively short time to find the best solution of parameters for optimization. Especially, it could be possible that the scrupulous parameters were obtained by genetic algorithm.