The start-up transient signals have been widely used for fault diagnosis of induction motor because they can reveal early defects in the development process, which are not easily detected with the signals in the steady state operation. However, transient signals are non-linear and contain multi components which need a suitable technique to process and identify the fault pattern. In this paper, the fault diagnosis problem of induction motor is conducted by a data driven framework where the Fourier-Bessel (FB) expansion is used as a tool to decompose transient current signal into series of single components. For each component, the statistical features in the time and the frequency domains are extracted to represent the characteristics of motor condition. The high dimensionality of the feature set is solved by generalized discriminant analysis (GDA) implementation to decrease the computational complexity of classification. In the meantime, with the aid of GDA, the separation of the feature clusters is increased, which enables the more classification accuracy to be achieved. Finally, the reduced dimensional features are used for classifier to perform the fault diagnosis results. The classifier used in this framework is the simplified fuzzy ARTMAP (SFAM) which belongs to a special class of neural networks (NNs) and provides a lower training time in comparison to other traditional NNs. The proposed framework is validated with transient current signals from an induction motor under different conditions including bowed rotor, broken rotor bar, eccentricity, faulty bearing, mass unbalance and phase unbalance. Additionally, this paper provides the comparative performance of (i) SFAM and support vector machine (SVM), (ii) SVM in the framework and SVM combined with wavelet transform in previous studies, (iii) the use of FB decomposition and Hilbert transform decomposition. The results show that the proposed diagnosis framework is capable of significantly improving the classification accuracy.