Congestive heart failure (CHF) is a chronic heart condition associated with debilitating symptoms that can lead to mortality. The electrocardiogram (ECG) is a noninvasive and simple diagnostic method that can show detectable changes in CHF. However, manual diagnosis of ECG signals is often erroneous due to the small amplitude and duration of the ECG signals. This paper presents a CHF diagnosis method based on generalized multiscale entropy (MSE)-wavelet leaders (WL) and extreme learning machine (ELM). Firstly, ECG signals from normal sinus rhythm (NSR) and congestive heart failure (CHF) patients are pre-processed. Then, parameters such as segmentation time and scale factor are chosen, and the multifractal spectrum features and number of ELM hidden layer nodes are determined. Two different data sets (A, B) were used for training and testing. In both sets, the balanced data set (B) had the highest accuracy of 99.72%, precision, sensitivity, specificity, and F1 score of 99.46%,100%,99.44%, and 99.73%, respectively. The unbalanced data set (A) attained an accuracy of 99.56%, precision of 99.44%, sensitivity of 99.81%, specificity of 99.17%, and F1 score of 99.62%. Finally, increasing the number of ECG segments and different algorithms validated the probability of detection of the unbalanced data set. The results indicate that our proposed method requires a lower number of ECG segments and does not require the detection of R waves. Moreover, the method can improve the probability of detection of unbalanced data sets and provide diagnostic assistance to cardiologists by providing a more objective and faster interpretation of ECG signals.