With the continuous development and complexity of industrial systems, various types of industrial equipment and systems face increasing risks of failure during operation. Important to these systems is fault warning technology, which can timely detect anomalies before failures and take corresponding preventive measures, thereby reducing production interruptions and maintenance costs, improving production efficiency, and enhancing equipment reliability. Machine learning techniques have proven highly effective for fault detection in modern production processes. Among numerous machine learning algorithms, the generalized neural network stands out due to its simplicity, effectiveness, and applicability to various fault warning scenarios. However, the increasing complexity of systems and equipment presents significant challenges to the generalized neural network. In real-world scenarios, it suffers from drawbacks such as difficulties in determining parameters and getting trapped in local optima, which affect its ability to meet the requirements of high efficiency and accuracy. To overcome these issues, this paper proposes a fault warning method based on an enhanced sand cat swarm optimization algorithm combined with a generalized neural network. First, we develop an enhanced sand cat swarm optimization algorithm that incorporates an improved chaotic mapping initialization strategy, as well as Cauchy mutation and reverse elite strategies based on adaptive selection. Subsequently, we utilize this algorithm to optimize the generalized neural network and determine its optimal parameters, effectively improving the accuracy and reliability of system fault warnings. The proposed method is validated using actual industrial system data, specifically for generator fault warning, and is demonstrated to outperform other advanced fault warning techniques. This research provides valuable insights and promising directions for enhancing industrial fault warning capabilities.