Objectives This paper focuses on developing a regularization-based feature selection approach to select the most effective attributes from the Parkinson’s speech dataset. Parkinson’s disease is a medical condition that progresses as the dopamine-producing nerve cells are affected. Early diagnosis often reduces the effect on the individuals, minimizes the advancement over time. In recent times, intelligent computational models are used in many complex cases to diagnose a clinical condition with high precision. These models are intended to find meaningful representation from the data to diagnose the disease. Machine learning acts as a tool, gears up the model learning process through a mathematical baseline. But, not in all cases, machine learning will be demanded to perform optimally. It comes with a few constraints, mainly the representation of the data. The learning models expect a clean, noise-free input, which in-turns produces better discriminative patterns over different categories of classes. Methods The proposed model identified five candidate features as predictors. This feature subset is trained with different varieties of supervised classifiers to trace out the best-performing model. Results The results are validated through accuracy, precision, recall, and receiver’s operational characteristic curves. The proposed regularization- based feature selection model outperformed the benchmark algorithms by attaining 100% accuracy on most of the classifiers, other than linear discriminant analysis (99.90%) and naïve Bayes (99.51%). Conclusions This paper exhibits the need for intelligent models to analyze complex data patterns to assist medical practitioners in better disease diagnosis. The results exhibit that the regularization methods find the best features based on their importance score, which improved the model performance over other feature selection methods.