With data in industrial processes being larger in scale and easier to access, data-driven technologies have become more prevalent in process monitoring. Fault classification is an indispensable part of process monitoring, while machine learning is an effective tool for fault classification. In most practical cases, however, the number of fault data is far smaller than normal data, and this imbalance of dataset would lead to the significant decline in performance of common classifier learning algorithms. To this issue, we propose a data augmentation method, which is based on Generative Adversarial Networks(GAN) and aided by Gaussian Discriminant Analysis(GDA), for enhancement of fault classification accuracy. To validate the effectiveness of this method for imbalanced fault classification, on toy data and the Tennessee Eastman (TE) benchmark process, common oversampling method and the basic GAN are compared to our method, with different classification algorithms. Besides, proposed method is deployed and parallelly trained on Tensorflow platform, which is suitable for applications like data augmentation and imbalanced fault classification in industrial big data environments. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.