In this work, a novel bearing fault identification scheme making use of deep learning has been proposed. Initially, the raw vibration signal is passed through a time-varying filter based empirical mode decomposition (TVF-EMD) to obtain different modes. Filter parameters of TVF-EMD are optimized by a newly developed optimization algorithm i.e., ameliorated African vulture optimization algorithm (A-AVOA). The Kernel estimate for mutual information (KEMI) has been considered as the fitness index for the developed optimization algorithm. The mode having the least value of fitness index is known as a prominent mode from which sensitive features representing different bearing conditions are extracted. These extracted features help in preparing the data matrix which is further utilised to build fuzzy-based classification models. The results obtained revealed that the linguistic hedge neuro-fuzzy classifier obtained maximum performance with the least computational time. The comparison of the developed method has also been done with other classification models viz., KNN, SVM, ELM and random forest that revealed the superiority of the developed method.