According to the nonlinearity, non-stationarity and multi-component coupling characteristics of reciprocating compressor vibration signals, a fault diagnosis method of a reciprocating compressor valve based on modified multiscale entropy (MMSE) and global distance evaluation (GDE) is proposed. First, the variational mode decomposition (VMD) method with superior anti-interference performance was utilized to analyse the strong non-stationarity vibration signals for all fault states. The modified multiscale entropy (MMSE) method provided for movingaverage procedures by replacing mean-average coarse-grained procedures was developed for the vibration signals after de-noising, and then the GDE method of overall parameter selection was introduced to evaluate the extracted MMSE and to select the optimal sensitivity scale feature. Finally, a binary tree of support vector machine (BTSVM) was selected as the classifier to identify the reciprocating compressor valve fault type. By analysing the experimental data, it can be shown that the method can effectively identify the fault type of the reciprocating compressor valve.