Support vector machine (SVM) is a popular machine learning algorithm used extensively in machine fault diagnosis. In this paper, linear, radial basis function (RBF), polynomial, and sigmoid kernels are experimented to diagnose inter-turn faults in a 3kVA synchronous generator. From the preliminary results, it is observed that the performance of the baseline systemis not satisfactory since the statistical features are nonlinear and does not match to the kernels used. In this work, the features are linearized to a higher dimensional space to improve the performance of fault diagnosis system for a synchronous generator using feature mapping techniques, sparse coding and locality constrained linear coding (LLC). Experiments and results show that LLC is superior to sparse coding for improving the performance of fault diagnosis of a synchronous generator. For the balanced data set, LLC improves the overall fault identification accuracy of the baseline RBF system by 22.56%, 18.43% and 17.05% for the R, Y and Bphase faults respectively.