There has been a lot of research has been performed regarding diagnosing rolling element bearing faults using wavelet analysis, but almost all methods are not ideal for picking up fault signal characteristics under strong noise. Therefore, this paper proposes auto-correlation, cross-correlation and weighted average fault diagnosis methods based on wavelet transform (WT) de-noising which combine correlation analysis with WT for the first time. These three methods compute the auto-correlation, the cross-correlation and the weighted average of the measured vibration signals, then de-noise by thresholding and computing the auto-correlation of de-noised coefficients of WT and FFT of energy sequence. The simulation results indicate that all methods enhance the capabilities of fault diagnosis of rolling bearings and pick up the fault characteristics effectively.