Locality preserving projection (LPP) is a newly emerging fault diagnosis method which can discover local manifold structure of the analyzed data set, but its linear assumption may lead to monitoring performance degradation for complicated nonlinear industrial processes. In this paper, an improved LPP method, referred to as sparse kernel locality preserving projection (SKLPP) is proposed for nonlinear process fault diagnosis. Based on the LPP model, kernel trick is applied to construct nonlinear kernel model. Furthermore, for reducing the computational complexity of kernel model, feature samples selection technique is adopted to make the kernel LPP model sparse. Lastly two monitoring statistics of SKLPP model are built to detect process faults. Simulations on a continuous stirred tank reactor (CSTR) system show that SKLPP is more effective than LPP in terms of fault detection performance.