Currently, the diagnostic performance of many deep learning algorithms may drop dramatically when the distribution of training data is significantly different from that of the test data. Moreover, the fault diagnosis approaches based on single-channel data may suffer problems such as large precision fluctuation, low reliability, and incomplete expression of fault features. To overcome the above deficiencies, a novel multi-channel data-driven fault recognition method based on the fusion of sparse filtering and discriminative domain adaptation (MSFDDA) is proposed in this article. Firstly, inspired by attention mechanisms and information fusion methods, a spectrum-based weighted multi-channel data fusion strategy (WMCDF) is designed to fully utilize the data collected by sensors to obtain a more comprehensive representation of fault features. Then, the joint probability-based discriminative maximum mean discrepancy algorithm is introduced into the sparse filtering method to strengthen the capability of extracting the domain invariant features. Finally, two bearing datasets are employed to verify the validity of the MSFDDA method, which proved to be superior to other current domain adaptation methods.