Stratification of High-Risk Hypertensive Patients Using Hybrid Heart Rate Variability Features and Boosting Algorithms

Hypertension is a global challenge to the public health which can easily lead to life-threatening vascular diseases unless control measures are adopted. Considering the prevalence of vascular diseases and their fatality, early detection of high-risk patients is an important problem in the present world. Heart rate variability (HRV) analysis can be an effective prognostic tool to identify the characteristics of vulnerable patients, considering its reliability in predicting sudden cardiac deaths. However, challenge lies in identifying tenuous differences in HRV between the low-risk and high-risk patients at the early stage. With this motivation, we propose a hybrid approach based on dual-tree complex wavelet packet transform (DTCWPT) and linear time domain as well as nonlinear analysis of HRV signal to extract multitudinous features. A key issue before the HRV analysis of such patients is the presence of marked amount of ectopic beats, which is addressed by using time-varying auto regressive (TVAR) technique. The features extracted from TVAR edited HRV signals are shortlisted by minimum redundancy maximum relevance algorithm for an efficient classifier modeling. Furthermore in this study, we propose to use cost-sensitive RUSBoost (CS-RUSBoost) algorithm for handling the class imbalance problem of the data. A comparative performance evaluation of CS-RUSBoost with RUSBoost, SMOTEBoost, asymmetric AdaBoost algorithm shows a superior result by CS-RUSBoost with G-mean of 0.9352 and F1 score of 0.9347.