Reciprocating compressor vibration signal is typical nonlinear and non-stationary,and the vibration information interference coupling, owing to this problem,a fault diagnosis method of reciprocating compressor on the resonance-based sparse signal decomposition with optimal Q-factor was proposed.The method use resonance sparse decomposition to find the low resonance component which its kurtosis is maximum, optimize Q-factor with genetic algorithm and particle swarm optimization to get the optimal Q-factor;then use resonance sparse decomposition to decompose reciprocating compressor vibration signal by the optimal Q-factor;the result shows that this method can diagnose the oversized bearing clearance fault effectively.