[en] The most common and effective way of rotating machinery diagnostics is to extract fault impact features from the vibration signals and to carry out further processing. As for planetary gear sets, because of the simultaneous mesh of multiple gears and the effect of the carrier rotation, the fault features are submerged in the strong harmonic signals and other noise. Due to the lack of prior information on the faults, the conventional fault diagnostic methods often fail to achieve satisfactory results. To address this problem, we give the prior information of a chipped planetary gear set by dynamics simulation, and utilize the information in the time domain to improve the diagnosis performance. Firstly, a pure torsional lumped parameter model is used to simulate the system vibration response with different degrees of failure. Through statistical analysis, the margin factor, the most sensitive indicator, is selected as prior information to reflect the local gear fault among several indexes. Finally, a weighted sparse representation method based on the prior information provided above is proposed to extract the impact features. Moreover, it is found that the extracted components have a strong–weak cyclic impact feature in the chipped planetary gear sets. The features and effectiveness of the method are verified by an experiment on a planetary gearbox test rig. To validate the superiority of the proposed method, comparisons are made among several state-of-the-art feature extraction methods. (paper)