Purpose This paper aims to provide a novel integrated fault detection method for industrial process monitoring. Design/methodology/approach A novel integrated fault detection method based on the combination of Mallat (MA) algorithm, weight-elimination (WE) algorithm, conjugate gradient (CG) algorithm and multi-dimensional Taylor network (MTN) dynamic model, namely, MA-WE-CG-MTN, is proposed in this paper. First, MA algorithm is taken as data pre-processing. Second, in virtue of approximation ability and low computation complexity owing to the simple structure of MTN, MTN dynamic models are constructed for each frequency band. Furthermore, the CG algorithm is used to discipline the model parameters and the outputs of MTN model of each frequency band are gained. Third, the authors introduce the WE algorithm to cut down the number of middle layer nodes of MTN, reducing the complexity of the network. Finally, the outputs of MTN model for each frequency band are superimposed to achieve outputs of MTN model, and fault detection is proceeded by the residual error generator based on the difference between the output of MTN model and the actual output. Findings The novel proposed method is used to perform fault detection for industrial process monitoring effectively, such as the Benchmark Simulation Model 1 wastewater treatment process. Originality/value The novel proposed method has generality and provides considerably improved performance and effectiveness, which is used to perform fault detection for industrial process monitoring. The proposed method has good robustness, low complexity and easy implementation.