The heart is an important organ that plays a crucial role in maintaining life. Unfortunately, heart disease is one of the major causes of mortality globally. Early and accurate detection can significantly improve the situation by enabling preventive measures and personalized healthcare recommendations. Artificial intelligence is emerging as a powerful tool for healthcare applications, particularly in predicting heart diseases. Researchers are actively working on this, but challenges remain in achieving accurate heart disease prediction. Therefore, experimenting with various models to identify the most effective one for heart disease prediction is crucial. In this view, this paper addresses this need by conducting an extensive investigation of various models. The proposed research considered 11 feature selection techniques and 21 classifiers for the experiment. The feature selection techniques considered for the research are Information Gain, Chi-Square Test, Fisher Discriminant Analysis (FDA), Variance Threshold, Mean Absolute Difference (MAD), Dispersion Ratio, Relief, LASSO, Random Forest Importance, Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), and Principal Component Analysis (PCA). The classifiers considered for the research are Logistic Regression, Decision Tree, Random Forest, K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Gaussian Naïve Bayes (GNB), XGBoost, AdaBoost, Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD), Gradient Boosting Classifier, Extra Tree Classifier, CatBoost, LightGBM, Multilayer Perceptron (MLP), Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU), Bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM), Bidirectional GRU (BiGRU), Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), and Hybrid Model (CNN, RNN, LSTM, GRU, BiLSTM, BiGRU). Among all the extensive experiments, XGBoost outperformed all others, achieving an accuracy of 0.97, precision of 0.97, sensitivity of 0.98, specificity of 0.98, F1 score of 0.98, and AUC of 0.98.