The periodic transient shocks triggered by damages in rolling bearings are frequently overshadowed by disruptive elements such as noise and harmonics. Therefore, the extraction of fault characteristics from these disturbances to identify the health status of the bearing is crucial for fault diagnosis. This study presents a novel approach, the Period Analysis
Dictionary Weighted Sparse Representation Classification (PAD-WSRC) method, designed specifically for rolling bearings. The proposed approach incorporates Bi-damped wavelet (Bi-DW) as the dictionary wavelet atom, while accounting for the pulse characteristics induced by faults and leveraging prior knowledge of periodicity. A weighted sparse representation method was also designed, which calculates the weighted sparse representation coefficients of samples, amplifying the local features of samples while addressing the impact of time-shift bias. In addition, the bearing fault type is identified using a mutual correlation classification criterion based on sparse approximation. Our PAD-WSRC strategy has demonstrated its effectiveness in classifying the health status of bearings across two datasets, achieving recognition accuracies of 99.75% and 99.69%, respectively. Comparisons with several traditional methods further underscore the effectiveness and superiority of our proposed method in classifying rolling bearing faults.