This paper investigates the use of the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) to improve the quality of extracted features for machine learning. The case study in this paper is detecting the health state of the ballscrew of a gantry type machine tool. For the implementation of the algorithm for feature extraction, wavelet is first applied to the data, followed by FFT and then useful features are extracted from the resultant signal. The extracted features were then used in various machine learning algorithms like decision tree, K-nearest neighbour (KNN) and support vector machine (SVM) for binary classification of the ballscrew state. The result shows significant improvement in the classification accuracy after the wavelet transform and FFT has been performed on the data.