The invention discloses a rail transit fault identification method based on an association rule classifier. The method comprises the steps that (1), attributive characters and fault categories corresponding to the attributive characters are extracted from historical fault data, each fault datum is represented by a transaction, one or more association rules corresponding to each transaction are built for the corresponding transaction, and an association rule set is obtained; (2), the support degree and confidence coefficient of each association rule are calculated according to the number of the transactions, containing the corresponding association rule, in a transaction set, and a strong rule is obtained; (3) an association rule hard classification model is built according to the strong rule; the percentage of each non-strong ruler in the association rule set is calculated, and an association rule soft classification model is built; (4) the attributive characters of the fault data monitored in real time are extracted, and are classified through the hard classification model and the soft classification model. According to the rail transit fault identification method based on the association rule classifier, fault identification accuracy is improved, fault correction time is shortened, fault self-diagnosis is achieved for equipment, and driving safety is ensured from the two aspects of operation and maintenance and equipment.