The traditional gas sensor array has been viewed as a simple apparatus for information acquisition in chemosensory systems. Gas sensor arrays frequently undergo impairments in the form of sensor failures that cause significant deterioration of the performance of previously trained pattern recognition models. Reliability monitoring of gas sensor arrays is a challenging and critical issue in the chemosensory system. Because of its importance, we design and implement a status self-validating gas sensor array prototype to enhance the reliability of its measurements. A novel fault detection, isolation, and diagnosis (FDID) strategy is presented in this paper. The principal component analysis-based multivariate statistical process monitoring model can effectively perform fault detection by using the squared prediction error statistic and can locate the faulty sensor in the gas sensor array by using the variables contribution plot. The signal features of gas sensor arrays for different fault modes are extracted by using ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD) coupled with sample entropy (SampEn). The EEMD is applied to adaptively decompose the original gas sensor signals into a finite number of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) and a residual. The SampEn values of each IMF and the residual are calculated to reveal the multi-scale intrinsic characteristics of the faulty sensor signals. Sparse representation-based classification is introduced to identify the sensor fault type for the purpose of diagnosing deterioration in the gas sensor array. The performance of the proposed strategy is compared with other different diagnostic approaches, and it is fully evaluated in a real status self-validating gas sensor array experimental system. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed strategy provides an excellent solution to the FDID of status self-validating gas sensor arrays.