  The healthcare industry generates enormous amounts of complex clinical data
that make the prediction of disease detection a complicated process. In medical
informatics, making effective and efficient decisions is very important. Data
Mining (DM) techniques are mainly used to identify and extract hidden patterns
and interesting knowledge to diagnose and predict diseases in medical datasets.
Nowadays, heart disease is considered one of the most important problems in the
healthcare field. Therefore, early diagnosis leads to a reduction in deaths. DM
techniques have proven highly effective for predicting and diagnosing heart
diseases. This work utilizes the classification algorithms with a medical
dataset of heart disease; namely, J48, Random Forest, and Na\"ive Bayes to
discover the accuracy of their performance. We also examine the impact of the
feature selection method. A comparative and analysis study was performed to
determine the best technique using Waikato Environment for Knowledge Analysis
(Weka) software, version 3.8.6. The performance of the utilized algorithms was
evaluated using standard metrics such as accuracy, sensitivity and specificity.
The importance of using classification techniques for heart disease diagnosis
has been highlighted. We also reduced the number of attributes in the dataset,
which showed a significant improvement in prediction accuracy. The results
indicate that the best algorithm for predicting heart disease was Random Forest
with an accuracy of 99.24%.
