Most multivariate statistical monitoring methods based on principal component analysis (PCA) assume implicitly that the observations at one time are statistically independent of observations at past time and the latent variables follow a Gaussian distribution. However, in real chemical and biological processes, these assumptions are invalid because of their dynamic and nonlinear characteristics. Therefore, monitoring charts based on conventional PCA tend to show many false alarms and bad delectability. In this paper, a new statistical process monitoring method using dynamic independent component analysis (DICA) is proposed to overcome these disadvantages. ICA is a recently developed technique for revealing hidden factors that underlies sets of measurements followed on a non-Gaussian distribution. Its goal is to decompose a set of multivariate data into a base of statistically independent components without a loss of information. The proposed DICA monitoring method is applying ICA to the augmenting matrix with time-lagged variables. DICA can show more powerful monitoring performance in the case of a dynamic process since it can extract source signals which are independent of the auto- and cross-correlation of variables. It is applied to fault detection in both a simple multivariate dynamic process and the Tennessee Eastman process. The simulation results clearly show that the method effectively detects faults in a multivariate dynamic process. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.