The analytics techniques in Big Data are extensively employed as an alternative to generalized for data mining due to the huge volumes of large-scale high dimensional data. Feature selection techniques eradicate the redundant and inappropriate features to decrease the data dimensionality and increase the classifiers' efficiency. However, the traditional feature selection strategies are dearth of scalability to handle the unique characteristics of large-scale data and extract the valuable features within the restricted time. This article proposed a feature selection algorithm centered on the Population and Global Search Improved Squirrel Search Algorithm (PGS-ISSA) that tackles the problem of local optimum and reduce convergence rate in standard Squirrel Search Algorithm (SSA). The novelty of this proposed PGS-ISSA is the introduction of chaos theory to improve population initialization so that the search space is increased. Then the acceleration coefficients are used in the position update equations to improve the convergence rate in local search process while inertia weight is also applied to optimally balance the exploration and exploitation in SSA. PGS-ISSA employs the fitness function based on the minimum error rate for ensuring the selection of best features that improve the classification accuracy. The proposed PGS-ISSA based feature section algorithm is evaluated by using Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier implemented in MATLAB tool to address the big data classification problem. The experiments performed on both small and large-scale datasets illustrated that the suggested PGS-ISSA enhances the classification accuracy by 1.7% to 5.4% better than other compared models through effective handling of the big data problems. The results obtained for the bigger Higgs dataset shows that the proposed PGS-ISSA achieved high performance than the standard SSA, existing ISSA models and other prominent optimizationbased feature selection algorithms with 64.72% accuracy, 67.3194% precision, 62.1528% recall, 62.3026% f-measure, 82.7226% specificity and consumed less time of 140.1366 seconds. PGS-ISSA also achieved comparatively better results for the other benchmark datasets with 0.3% to 6% improvement on statistical metrics and 10% to 25% reduction in execution time.