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• A novel adaptive signal decomposition method named RVME is proposed. • Simulated and experimental cases validate the effectiveness of the proposed method. • RVME has higher computational efficiency than VMD. The variational mode extraction (VME) developed on the similar basis of variational mode decomposition (VMD) can effectively separate a specific mode by knowing an approximate center frequency from the multi-component signal. Compared with VMD, VME has made certain progress in improving the extraction accuracy and reducing the computational cost when the aim is to separate a specific mode. As the fault feature signal of rolling bearing is usually a band-limited signal which is compact around the excited resonant frequency, VME becomes a potentially effective tool for extracting fault characteristics of rolling bearing. However, how to adaptively determine the center frequency and the penalty factor are two difficult problems when using VME to separate the desired component. Accordingly, this paper presents the recursive variational mode extraction (RVME), an iterative VME-based signal decomposition algorithm. At each iteration of RVME, the initial center frequency and penalty factor for the reconstruction of a specific sub-component can be adaptively determined according to the dominant frequency of the residual signal of the previous iterative decomposition, which makes RVME an adaptive signal decomposition algorithm. The presented method is applied to simulated and experimental fault signals and compared with other classical fault feature extraction approaches, such as variational mode decomposition (VMD) and spectral kurtosis (SK). The results confirm that the established method can extract the fault features as effective as VMD, but it is significantly better than VMD in terms of computational efficiency. Meanwhile, the proposed method shows a stronger capability of weak bearing fault feature extraction and compound fault feature separation compared with SK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]