The fuel cell engine mechanism model is used to research fault diagnosis based on a data-driven method to identify the failure of proton exchange membrane fuel cells in the process of operation, which leads to the degradation of system performance and other problems. In this paper, an extreme learning machine and a support vector machine are applied to classify the usual faults of fuel cells, including air compressor faults, air supply pipe and return pipe leaks, stack flooding faults and temperature controller faults. The accuracy of fault classification was 78.67% and 83.33% respectively. In order to improve the efficiency of fault classification, a genetic algorithm is used to optimize the parameters of the support vector machine. The simulation results show that the accuracy of fault classification was improved to 94% after optimization.