Power quality disturbance (PQD) is an important issue in electrical distribution systems that needs to be detected promptly and identified to prevent the degradation of system reliability. This work proposes a PQD classification using a novel algorithm, comprised of the artificial bee colony (ABC) and the particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithms, called “adaptive ABC-PSO” as the feature selection algorithm. The proposed adaptive technique is applied to a combination of ABC and PSO algorithms, and then used as the feature selection algorithm. A discrete wavelet transform is used as the feature extraction method, and a probabilistic neural network is used as the classifier. We found that the highest classification accuracy (99.31%) could be achieved through nine optimally selected features out of all 72 extracted features. Moreover, the proposed PQD classification system demonstrated high performance in a noisy environment, as well as the real distribution system. When comparing the presented PQD classification system’s performance to previous studies, PQD classification accuracy using adaptive ABC-PSO as the optimal feature selection algorithm is considered to be at a high-range scale; therefore, the adaptive ABC-PSO algorithm can be used to classify the PQD in a practical electrical distribution system.