Rolling bearing is of great importance in modern industrial products, the failure of which may result in accidents and economic losses. Therefore, fault diagnosis of rolling bearing is significant and necessary and can enhance the reliability and efficiency of mechanical systems. Therefore, a novel fault diagnosis method for rolling bearing based on semi-supervised clustering and support vector data description (SVDD) with adaptive parameter optimization and improved decision strategy is proposed in this study. First, variational mode decomposition (VMD) was applied to decompose the vibration signals into sets of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs), where the decomposing mode number K was determined by the central frequency observation method. Next, fuzzy entropy (FuzzyEn) values of all IMFs were calculated to construct the feature vectors of different types of faults. Later, training samples were clustered with semi-supervised fuzzy C-means clustering (SSFCM) for fully exploiting the information inside samples, whereupon a small number of labeled samples were able to provide sufficient data distribution information for subsequent SVDD algorithms and improve its recognition ability. Afterwards, SVDD with improved decision strategy (ID-SVDD) that combined with k-nearest neighbor was proposed to establish diagnostic model. Simultaneously, the optimal parameters C and Ï for ID-SVDD were searched by the newly proposed sine cosine algorithm improved with adaptive updating strategy (ASCA). Finally, the proposed diagnosis method was applied for engineering application as well as contrastive analysis. The obtained results reveal that the proposed method exhibits the best performance in all evaluation metrics and has advantages over other comparison methods in both precision and stability.