Sentiment analysis is one of the popular techniques gaining attention in recent times. Nowadays, people gain information on reviews of users regarding public transportation, movies, hotel reservation, etc., by utilizing the resources available, as they meet their needs. Hence, sentiment classification is an essential process employed to determine the positive and negative responses. This paper presents an approach for sentiment classification of train reviews using MapReduce model with the proposed Kernel Optimized-Support Vector Machine (KO-SVM) classifier. The MapReduce framework handles big data using a mapper, which performs feature extraction and reducer that classifies the review based on KO-SVM classification. The feature extraction process utilizes features that are classification-specific and SentiWordNet-based. KO-SVM adopts SVM for the classification, where the exponential kernel is replaced by an optimized kernel, finding the weights using a novel optimizer, self-adaptive lion algorithm. In a comparative analysis, the performance of KO-SVM classifier is compared with SentiWordNet, Naive Bayes, neural network, and LSVM, using the evaluation metrics, specificity, sensitivity, and accuracy, with train review and movie review database. The proposed KO-SVM classifier could attain maximum sensitivity of 93.46% and 91.249%, specificity of 74.485% and 70.018%; and accuracy of 84.341% and 79.611%, respectively, for train review and movie review databases.