Sentiment analysis is an ongoing research field within the discipline of data mining. The majority of academics employ deep learning models for sentiment analysis due to their ability to self-learn and process vast amounts of data. However, the performance of deep learning models depends on the values of the hyperparameters. Determining suitable values for hyperparameters is a cumbersome task. The goal of this study is to increase the accuracy of stacked autoencoders for sentiment analysis using a heuristic optimization approach. In this study, we propose a hybrid model GA(SAE)-SVM using a genetic algorithm (GA), stacked autoencoder (SAE), and support vector machine (SVM) for fine-grained sentiment analysis. Features are extracted using continuous bag-of-words (CBOW), and then input into the SAE. In the proposed GA(SAE)-SVM, the hyperparameters of the SAE algorithm are optimized using GA. The features extracted by SAE are input into the SVM for final classification. A comparison is performed with a random search and grid search for parameter optimization. GA optimization is faster than grid search, and selects more optimal values than random search, resulting in improved accuracy. We evaluate the performance of the proposed model on eight benchmark datasets. The proposed model outperformed when compared to the baseline and state-of-the-art techniques.