This article developed an improved statistical pattern analysis (SPA) monitoring strategy for fault detection of complex multivariate processes using empirical likelihood. The technique based on statistical pattern analysis performs fault detection by inspecting change in the statistics of process variables (e.g., mean value, correlation coefficient, variance, kurtosis, etc.). It is capable of monitoring non-Gaussian or even nonlinear processes. However, the original SPA framework explicitly computes all the high-order statistics, which significantly increases the scale and dimensionality of the problem, especially in the case of complex multivariate processes. To alleviate this difficulty, we propose monitoring changes in the statistics with the same order using empirical likelihood, which is a widely used estimation method to construct confidence limits or regions for parameters with similar properties. As a result, changes in statistics of the same order can be translated into a single index; hence more information on the faulty conditions can be observed. Furthermore, by considering statistics of the same order, the scale of the problem is reduced significantly. The improved statistical pattern analysis monitoring strategy is suitable for monitoring complex multivariate processes. The performance of the improved method is illustrated by an application study to fault detection of the Tennessee Eastman (TE) process.