Abstract: Machine learning is used as an effective support system in health diagnosis which contains large volume of data. More commonly, analyzing such a large volume of data consumes more resources and execution time. In addition, all the features present in the dataset do not support in achieving the solution of the given problem. Hence, there is a need to use an effective feature selection algorithm for finding the more important features that contribute more in diagnosing the diseases. The Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is one of the metaheuristic algorithms to find the best solution with less time. Nowadays, PSO algorithm is not only used to select the more significant features but also removes the irrelevant and redundant features present in the dataset. However, the traditional PSO algorithm has an issue in selecting the optimal weight to update the velocity and position of the particles. To overcome this issue, this paper presents a novel function for identifying optimal weights on the basis of population diversity function and tuning function. We have also proposed a novel fitness function for PSO with the help of Support Vector Machine (SVM). The objective of the fitness function is to minimize the number of attributes and increase the accuracy. The performance of the proposed PSO-SVM is compared with the various existing feature selection algorithms such as Info gain, Chi-squared, One attribute based, Consistency subset, Relief, CFS, Filtered subset, Filtered attribute, Gain ratio and PSO algorithm. The SVM classifier is also compared with several classifiers such as Naive Bayes, Random forest and MLP. © 2018, Pleiades Publishing, Ltd.