As the basic guarantee for people’s production and life, the safe operation of the power system has an important impact on the development and operation of society. To ensure the safe and stable operation of the power grid, predicting potential faults and taking reasonable preventive measures can effectively avoid the occurrence of power accidents. However, due to the difficulty in ensuring the prediction accuracy of traditional methods, there are issues of protection misoperation and rejection. Therefore, in order to achieve accurate prediction of power grid faults and avoid protection misoperation and rejection issues, a distribution network fault classification prediction model using a combination of three-layer data mining model (TLDM) and adaptive moment estimation (Adam) algorithm/random gradient descent algorithm improved backpropagation neural network (BPNN) is proposed. The implementation results showed that the classification accuracy of artificial fish school [Formula: see text] priori, [Formula: see text]-means clustering convolutional neural network model and TLDM for single-phase grounding faults was 93.2%, 91.5% and 96.6%, respectively. The classification accuracy for two-phase faults was 92.8%, 92.4% and 95.7%, respectively. The classification accuracy for two-phase grounding faults was 93.7%, 91.2% and 96.9%, respectively. The classification accuracy for three-phase faults was 93.3%, 92.1% and 97.1%, respectively. The TLDM had the highest classification accuracy. The average accuracy, average accuracy and average recall of the BPNN improved by the combination of the ADAM algorithm and random gradient descent algorithm were 94.1%, 90.9% and 88%, respectively, which were higher than the BPNN improved by the combination of ADAM algorithm and random gradient descent algorithm. The above results indicate that the proposed distribution network fault classification and prediction model has good performance and can achieve accurate prediction of distribution network faults.