In numerous perilous cases, a quick medical decision is needed for the early detection of chronic diseases to avoid austere consequences that may be fatal. Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is a prevalent disease that presents a variety of challenges, including soaring costs for intervention, urgency, and, more importantly, difficulty in early detection of the disease. The current study carries out a prediction‐based method that helps in detecting and diagnosing CKD patients which enables a fast and accurate decision‐making process at the early stage. A combination of preprocessing and feature selection methods was developed; additionally, several prediction models, such as K‐nearest neighbor (KNN), support vector machine (SVM), random forest (RF), and bagging, were trained based on the processed dataset. The performance evaluation shows higher reliability of all models in terms of accuracy, precision, sensitivity, F‐measure, specificity, and area under the curve (AUC) score. Specifically, KNN outperformed with an accuracy of 99.50%, sensitivity of 99.2%, precision of 100%, specificity of 98.7%, and F‐measure and AUC score of 99.6%. The experimental results of KNN show the best fitted model compared to the existing state‐of‐the‐art methods. Moreover, the reduced feature set proves that just a few clinical tests are enough to detect CKD, resulting in diagnosis cost reduction.