As a practical tool for big data processing, deep learning not only has drawn extensive attentions in the inherent law and representation level of sample data, but also has been widely concerned in the field of mechanical intelligent fault diagnosis. In deep learning models, autoencoder (AE) and its derivative models can automatically extract useful features from big data, and many researchers have successfully applied them to the field of intelligent fault diagnosis. However, these studies always neglect two important points as follows: (1) the model training process will not be ideal when the original training dataset is insufficient; (2) the learning content of the network model is not clear. In order to surmount the above deficiencies, this paper proposes a novel framework named Data-enhanced Stacked Autoencoders (DESAE), which consists of a data enhancement module and a fault classification module. In the data enhancement module, SAE is adopted to generate simulated signals to strengthen the insufficient training data. In the fault classification module, the enhanced dataset is used to train another SAE model for fault type recognition. Meanwhile, two bearing datasets are employed to validate the efficiency of the proposed method. The experimental results show that the proposed method is superior to the method without enhanced data. In addition, the visual analysis of the learning characteristics in each layer of DESAE is presented, which is helpful to understand the working process of DESAE. INDEX TERMS Intelligent fault diagnosis, deep learning, data-enhanced stacked auto-encoders, insufficient training data, simulated signals.