The number and size of medical databases are rapidly increasing, and the advanced models of data mining techniques could help physicians to make efficient and applicable decisions. The challenges of heart disease data include the feature selection, the number of the samples; imbalance of the samples, lack of magnitude for some features, etc. This study mainly focuses on the feature selection improvement and decreasing the numbers of the features. In this study, imperialist competitive algorithm with meta-heuristic approach is suggested in order to select prominent features of the heart disease. This algorithm can provide a more optimal response for feature selection toward genetic in compare with other optimization algorithms. Also, the K-nearest neighbor algorithm is used for the classification. Evaluation result shows that by using the proposed algorithm, the accuracy of feature selection technique has been improved.