In this paper, the cumulative residual Tsallis singular entropy (CRTSE) is introduced to measure the complex characteristics of nonlinear signals. Firstly, we do singular value decomposition on time series, which can reduce the interference of noise on information extraction, and the singular values represent the information characteristics of the signal. Then the statistical distribution of the signal is described by the cumulative residual function of singular values, and the Tsallis entropy is calculated to quantify the complexity. We verify the effectiveness and robustness of CRTSE through simulation experiments. Finally, we propose a grey wolf optimized support vector machine based on CRTSE called CRTSE-GWOSVM to intelligently diagnose complex systems. The results show that CRTSE can effectively measure the complex characteristics of time series, GWOSVM is superior to SVM and particle swarm optimized support vector machine (PSOSVM) in data identification, and CRTSE-GWOSVM model can identify complex systems more effectively and accurately.