Evaluation of three machine learning algorithms as classifiers of premature ventricular contractions on ECG beats

According to the World Health Organization, cardiovascular diseases (CVD) are the main cause of death worldwide. An estimated 17.5 million people died from CVD in 2012, representing 31% of all global deaths. The electrocardiogram (ECG) is a central tool for the pre-diagnosis of heart diseases. Many advances on ECG arrhythmia classification have been developed in the last century; however, there is still research to identify malignant waveforms on ECG beats. The premature ventricular complexes (PVC) are known to be associated with malignant ventricular arrhythmias and in sudden cardiac death (SCD) cases. Detecting this kind of arrhythmia has been crucial in clinical applications. In this work, we extracted 80 different features from 108,653 ECG classified beats of the MIT-BIH database in order to classify the Normal, PVC and other kind of ECG beats. We evaluated three classifier algorithms based on Machine Learning with different parameters and we got a total of 14 models. We used the F1 score and we compared predictive values as a measured of classifier evaluations. Results show that we could have a F1 scores near to the unit, showing the models are higher than 93% of performance.