A nonlinear kernel Gaussian mixture model (NKGMM) based inferential monitoring method is proposed in this article for chemical process fault detection and diagnosis. Aimed at the multimode non-Gaussian process with within-mode nonlinearity, the developed NKGMM approach projects the operating data from the raw measurement space into the high-dimensional kernel feature space. Thus the Gaussian mixture model can be estimated in the feature space with each component satisfying multivariate Gaussianity. As a comparison, the conventional independent component analysis (ICA) searches for the non-Gaussian subspace with maximized negentropy, which is not equivalent to the multi-Gaussianity in multimode process. The regular Gaussian mixture model (GMM) method, on the other hand, assumes the Gaussianity of each cluster in the original data space and thus cannot effectively handle the within-mode nonlinearity. With the extracted kernel Gaussian components, the geometric distance driven inferential index is further derived to monitor the process operation and detect the faulty events. Moreover, the kernel Gaussian mixture based inferential index is decomposed into variable contributions for fault diagnosis. For the simulated multimode wastewater treatment process, the proposed NKGMM approach outperforms the ICA and GMM methods in early detection of process faults, minimization of false alarms, and isolation of faulty variables of nonlinear and non-Gaussian multimode processes. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.