This paper presents a strategy to represent and classify process data for detection of abnormal operating conditions. In representing the data, a wavelet-based smoothing algorithm is used to filter the high frequency noise. A shape analysis technique called triangular episodes then converts the smoothed data into a semi-qualitative form. Two membership functions are implemented to transform the quantitative information in the triangular episodes to a purely symbolic representation. The symbolic data is classified with a set of sequence matching hidden Markov models (HMMs), and the classification is improved by utilizing a time correlated HMM after the sequence matching HMM. The method is tested on simulations with a non-isothermal CSTR and compared with methods that use a back-propagation neural network with and without an ARX model.