Cardiovascular disease is a substantial cause of mortality and morbidity in the world. In clinical data analytics, it is a great challenge to predict heart disease survivor. Data mining transforms huge amounts of raw data generated by the health industry into useful information that can help in making informed decisions. Various studies proved that significant features play a key role in improving performance of machine learning models. This study analyzes the heart failure survivors from the dataset of 299 patients admitted in hospital. The aim is to find significant features and effective data mining techniques that can boost the accuracy of cardiovascular patient’s survivor prediction. To predict patient’s survival, this study employs nine classification models: Decision Tree (DT), Adaptive boosting classifier (AdaBoost), Logistic Regression (LR), Stochastic Gradient classifier (SGD), Random Forest (RF), Gradient Boosting classifier (GBM), Extra Tree Classifier (ETC), Gaussian Naive Bayes classifier (G-NB) and Support Vector Machine (SVM). The imbalance class problem is handled by Synthetic Minority Oversampling Technique (SMOTE). Furthermore, machine learning models are trained on the highest ranked features selected by RF. The results are compared with those provided by machine learning algorithms using full set of features. Experimental results demonstrate that ETC outperforms other models and achieves 0.9262 accuracy value with SMOTE in prediction of heart patient’s survival.