Based on the Pearson correlation coefficients

a new method for optimizing characteristic quantity is proposed to reduce the characteristic dimension of coil current in status assessment process of high voltage circuit breaker operating mechanism. To obtain three characteristic quantities with higher classification capability

the extracted coil current characteristic quantity is made use of to construct the Pearson correlation coefficient matrix

and the correlations of eight coil current characteristic quantities are analyzed and optimized. Then

the optimized characteristic quantities are input to neural network to assesse the status of high voltage circuit breaker operating mechanism. Experimental results show that the proposed method reduces the dimension of characteristic quantities

simplifies the structure of classifier

and achieves satisfactory status assessment of high voltage circuit breaker operating mechanism with fewer characteristic quantities.