Coronary artery disease (CAD) is currently a prevalent disease from which many people suffer. Early detection and treatment could reduce the risk of heart attack. Currently, the golden standard for the diagnosis of CAD is angiography, which is an invasive procedure. In this article, we propose an algorithm that uses data mining techniques, a fuzzy expert system, and the imperialist competitive algorithm (ICA), to make CAD diagnosis by a non-invasive procedure. The ICA is used to adjust the fuzzy membership functions. The proposed method has been evaluated with the Cleveland and Hungarian datasets. The advantage of this method, compared with others, is the interpretability. The accuracy of the proposed method is 94.92% by 11 rules, and the average length of 4. To compare the colonial competitive algorithm with other metaheuristic algorithms, the proposed method has been implemented with the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm. The results indicate that the colonial competition algorithm is more efficient than the PSO algorithm.