Partial discharge pattern recognition via sparse representation and ANN In this study, seventeen samples were created for classifying internal, surface, and corona partial discharges (PDs) in a high voltage lab. Next, PDs were measured experimentally to provide a dictionary comprising the types. Due to the huge size of the recorded dataset, a new and straightforward preprocessing method based on signal norms was used to extract the appropriate features of various samples. The new sparse representation classifier (SRC) was computed using ℓ1and stable ℓ1-norm minimization by means of Primal-Dual Interior Point (PDIP) and Basis Pursuit De-noise (BPDN) algorithms, respectively. The pattern recognition was also performed with an artificial neural network (ANN) and compared with the sparse method. It is shown that both methods have comparable performance if training process, tuning options, and other tasks for finding the best result from ANN are not taken into account. Even with this assumption, it is shown that SRC still performs better than ANN in some cases. In addition, the SRC technique presented in this paper converges to a fixed result, while the results after training the ANN vary with every run due to random initial weights.