Artificial intelligence in manufacturing systems is currently most used for quality control and predictive maintenance. In the lock industry, quality control of final assembled cylinder lock is still done by hand, wearing out the operators’ wrists and introducing subjectivity which negatively affects reliability. Studies have shown that quality control can be automated using machine-learning to analyse torque measurements from the locks. The resulting performance of the approach depends on the dimensionality and size of the training dataset but unfortunately, the process of gathering data can be expensive so the amount collected data should therefore be minimized with respect to an acceptable performance measure. The dimensionality can be reduced with a method called Principal Component Analysis and the training dataset size can be estimated by repeated testing of the algorithms with smaller datasets of different sizes, which then can be used to extrapolate the expected performance for larger datasets. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the state-of-the-art methods to predict and minimize the needed sample size for commonly used machine-learning algorithms to reach an acceptable anomaly detection accuracy using torque measurements from locks. The results show that the learning curve with the best fit to the training data does not always give the best predictions. Instead, performance depends on the amount of data used to create the curve and the particular machine-learning algorithm used. Overall, the exponential and power-law functions gave the most reliable predictions and the use of principal component analysis greatly reduced the learning effort for the machine-learning algorithms. With torque measurements from 50-150 locks, we predicted a detection accuracy of over 95% while the current method of using the human tactile sense gives only 16% accuracy.