This paper provides a comparison study on the basic data-driven methods for process monitoring and fault diagnosis (PM-FD). Based on the review of these methods and their recent developments, the original ideas, implementation conditions, off-line design and on-line computation algorithms as well as computation complexity are discussed in detail. In order to further compare their performance from the application viewpoint, an industrial benchmark of Tennessee Eastman (TE) process is utilized to illustrate the efficiencies of all the discussed methods. The study results are dedicated to provide a reference for achieving successful PM-FD on large scale industrial processes. Some important remarks are finally concluded in this paper. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.