With the vast advancements in the medical domain, earlier prediction of disease plays a substantial role in enhancing the healthcare quality and assists in taking better decisions making during emergency times. Most of the existing research concentrates on modeling an automated prediction model for heart disease and the risk factors. Nevertheless, accurate classification is a vital challenge in heart disease diagnosis where the managing of high‐dimensional data increases the execution time of existing classifiers. In this paper, a new ensemble model has been proposed with the aid of random subspace and K‐nearest neighbor (RSS‐KNN) scheme for earlier prediction of heart disease. Primarily, the proposed scheme implements an isolation‐based outlier removal mechanism to eradicate the noises and outliers in the distributed data. Subsequently, the essential features are identified using RSS by varying the testing and training errors in the evaluation phase. The extracted features are then fed into KNN for the accurate classification of heart disease. Finally, an enhanced squirrel optimizer has been employed in the proposed scheme to obtain the global results which balance the exploration as well as exploitation issues and eliminate the over‐fitting problems. The simulation results manifest that the accuracy (without features) of the proposed ensemble RSS‐KNN scheme in the UCI ML dataset is 97.65%, accuracy (with features) is 98.56%, and specificity is 98.10% when compared with existing state‐of‐the‐art classifiers.