Classification is an essential task for many applications, including text classification, image classification, data classification, and so on. The present study investigates the accuracy of different machine learning classification algorithms with three different data smoothing techniques for gas turbine fault detection and isolation task. The gas turbine performance model was developed by considering variable inlet guide vane and bleed air. Fouling and erosion were injected into all six main components of the gas turbine engine. Faulty and non-faulty data were generated from the developed performance model. Based on sensitivity analysis, 12 measurement parameters and 11,824 data points were selected for the development of a fault detection and isolation model. The faulty and non-faulty data were balanced, smoothed, corrected and normalized. Finally, the classification accuracy of the machine learning techniques was analyzed. The result shows that K-Nearest Neighbours, Neural Network and Decision Tree classifiers exhibited high classification accuracy, about 99 with all three data smoothing techniques. It is also observed that the computation time of Support Vector Machine is higher whereas K-Nearest Neighbours shows the lowest. Finally, the research proves that K-Nearest Neighbours is the best classification technique for gas turbine engine fault detection and isolation application. © 2022 THE AUTHORS