In this study, the effects of heart rate (HR) normalization in the analysis of the heart rate variability (HRV) were investigated to distinguish 29 patients with congestive heart failure from 54 healthy subjects in the control group. In the analysis performed, the best accuracy performances of optimal combination of standard short-term HRV measures and of HR-normalized short-term HRV measures are compared. A genetic algorithm is used to select the best features from among all possible combinations of these measures. A k-nearest-neighbour (KNN) classifier is used to evaluate the performances of the feature combinations in classifying these two data groups. The results imply that using both min—max and HR normalization improves the performance of the classification. The maximum accuracy is achieved as 93.98 per cent using k = 3 and k = 5 for the KNN classifier with the perfect positive predictivity values.