A method and system for recognizing (and/or predicting) failures of sensors used in monitoring gas turbines applies a sparse coding process to collected sensor readings and defines the L-1 norm residuals from the sparse coding process as indicative of a potential sensor problem. Further evaluation of the group of residual sensor readings is perform to categorize the group and determine if there are significant outliers (“abnormal data”), which would be considered as more likely associated with a faulty sensor than noisy data. A time component is introduced into the evaluation that compares a current abnormal result with a set of prior results and making the faulty sensor determination if a significant number of prior readings also have an abnormal value. By taking the time component into consideration, the number of false positives is reduced.