The study was intended to introduce a novel method for aided diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases based on photoplethysmography (PPG). For this purpose, 40 volunteers were recruited in this study, of whom the physiological and pathological information was collected, including blood pressure and simultaneous PPG data on fingertips, by using a sphygmomanometer and a smart fingertip sensor. According to the PPG signal and its first and second derivatives, 52 features were defined and acquired. The Relief feature selection algorithm was performed to calculate the contribution of each feature to cardiovascular diseases. And then 10 core features which had the greatest contribution were selected as an optimal feature subset. Finally, the efficiency of the Relief feature selection algorithm was demonstrated by the results of k-nearest neighbor (kNN) and support vector machine (SVM) classifier applications of the features. The prediction accuracy of kNN model and SVM reached 66.67% and 83.33% respectively, indicating that: ① Age was the foremost feature for aided diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases; ② The optimal feature subset provided an important evaluation of cardiovascular health status. The obtained results showed that the application of the Relief feature selection algorithm provided high accuracy in aided diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases.