To solve the problem of difficulty in extracting and identifying fault types during turbine rotor operation, a fault diagnosis method based on improved subtraction mean optimizer (NGSABO) algorithm to optimize variational mode decomposition (VMD) and CNN-BiLSTM neural network is proposed. Firstly, three improvements are made to the subtraction average optimizer algorithm. Secondly, the optimal VMD parameter combination of NGSABO adaptive selection mode decomposition number K and penalty factor is used to decompose the rotor fault signal, and the minimum sample entropy is used as the fitness function for feature extraction. Combining convolutional neural network and bidirectional long short-term memory network to identify and classify features. Compared with other methods, this method has outstanding performance in the diagnosis of single and coupled rotor faults. The accuracy of fault diagnosis reaches 98.5714%, which has good practical application value.