In the original fault identification methods, contribution plots are popular. However, it is not accurate because of the smearing effect. In addition, traditional contribution plots cannot be applied to nonlinear process because there seems no way to accurately calculate variable contributions. As a comparison, the reconstruction method is widely used in fault identification for finding the root causes of the fault. For fault detection and identification of actual industrial process with nonlinear and non-Gaussian features, a new reconstruction-based fault identification method with kernel independent component analysis (KICA) is developed in this article. The proposed method, reconstruction in integrating fault spaces (RIFSs), extends the classic reconstruction-based fault identification approach to KICA for the first time, and develops the reconstruction method from unidimensional faults to multidimensional ones for nonlinear cases. Furthermore, the number of reconstruction is effectively reduced on the basis of the integrating fault spaces (IFSs) which are composed of fault subspaces satisfying orthogonal to each other from the known fault set. In addition, fault magnitude, indicating the adjustment magnitude of a fault sample back to normal range, is used as index to identify faults, and it makes the fault identification problem become more straightforward than with the existing fault identification index, such as ratio (index I) or the reconstructed statistics (index II). Finally, the proposed method is applied to the fault detection and identification on cyanide leaching of gold, which shows its feasibility and efficiency for both sensor faults and complex process faults. (C) 2012 The Institution of Chemical Engineers. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.