Sugar in the blood can harm individuals and their vital organs, potentially leading to blindness, renal illness, as well as kidney and heart diseases. Globally, diabetic patients face an average annual mortality rate of 38%. This study employs Chi-square, mutual information, and sequential feature selection (SFS) to choose features for training multiple classifiers. These classifiers include an artificial neural network (ANN), a random forest (RF), a gradient boosting (GB) algorithm, Tab-Net, and a support vector machine (SVM). The goal is to predict the onset of diabetes at an earlier age. The classifier, developed based on the selected features, aims to enable early diagnosis of diabetes. The PIMA and early-risk diabetes datasets serve as test subjects for the developed system. The feature selection technique is then applied to focus on the most important and relevant features for model training. The experiment findings conclude that the ANN exhibited a spectacular performance in terms of accuracy on the PIMA dataset, achieving a remarkable accuracy rate of 99.35%. The second experiment, conducted on the early diabetes risk dataset using selected features, revealed that RF achieved an accuracy of 99.36%. Based on our experimental results, it can be concluded that our suggested method significantly outperformed baseline machine learning algorithms already employed for diabetes prediction on both datasets.