The identification of pulsar candidates is a crucial step in radio astronomy research. With the continuous improvement of modern radio telescope equipment and the increasing scale of pulsar sky survey, a pulsar survey will produce a large number of pulsar candidates. Identifying pulse signals from a large number of pulsar candidates is a prerequisite for discovering new pulsar. In the face of massive pulsar candidate data, it is a huge workload to identify pulsar candidates manually only by experts in relevant fields. In order to improve the efficiency of identifying pulsar candidates, a stacked autoencoder and self-normalizing neural network based pulsar candidate recognition framework AESNN is proposed, which does not need to consider the imbalance of the number of positive and negative samples in the pulsar data set. The pulsar candidate contains many features, but not all of them are important. The stacked autoencoder is used to extract the feature representation of the data, perform unsupervised dimensionality reduction, and input these features into the self-normalizing neural network for training. AESNN introduces self-normalizing properties by introducing 'scaled exponential linear units', and experiments show that AESNN has a high F1 score, precision, and recall, and does not require the use of complex data augmentation methods, making it more advantageous compared to other algorithms.