Rapid advances in information and communication technology have made ubiquitous computing and the Internet of Things popular and practicable. These applications create enormous volumes of data, which are available for analysis and classification as an aid to decision-making. Among the classification methods used to deal with big data, feature selection has proven particularly effective. One common approach involves searching through a subset of the features that are the most relevant to the topic or represent the most accurate description of the dataset. Unfortunately, searching through this kind of subset is a combinatorial problem that can be very time consuming. Meaheuristic algorithms are commonly used to facilitate the selection of features. The artificial fish swarm algorithm (AFSA) employs the intelligence underlying fish swarming behavior as a means to overcome optimization of combinatorial problems. AFSA has proven highly successful in a diversity of applications; however, there remain shortcomings, such as the likelihood of falling into a local optimum and a lack of multiplicity. This study proposes a modified AFSA (MAFSA) to improve feature selection and parameter optimization for support vector machine classifiers. Experiment results demonstrate the superiority of MAFSA in classification accuracy using subsets with fewer features for given UCI datasets, compared to the original FASA.