Arrhythmic Heartbeat Classification Using Ensemble of Random Forest and Support Vector Machine Algorithm

In this article, an automated heartbeat classification has been proposed to prevent the growing threats of cardiovascular diseases around the world. The MIT-BIH arrhythmia database has been used for the training and testing of the proposed approach. The database contains 90 095 normal (N), 2781 supraventricular (SVEB), 7008 ventricular (VEB), 802 fusions (F), and 15 unclassified (Q) beats each of 30 min duration. Total 61 features have been extracted using the time-series feature extraction library (TSFEL). Feature selection or reduction methods applied are feature scaling, removal of highly correlated and low variance features, and random forest (RF) recursive feature elimination. The methodological novelty of this study is mainly the incorporation of TSFEL during feature extractions, synthetic minority oversampling technique to create a balanced dataset, and an ensemble of RF and support vector machine (SVM) using weighted majority algorithm for heartbeat classification to improve the results. Grid search has been performed to optimize the hyperparameters of RF and SVM classifiers. A final evaluation has been carried out considering a “subject-specific” scheme. The sensitivity that our approach has achieved for the arrhythmic heartbeat classes is as follows: N: 99.50%, SVEB (S): 74.20%, VEB (V): 94.22%, F: 73.21%, and Q: 0%. The corresponding positive predictive values are N: 98.67%, SVEB (S): 90.09%, VEB (V): 95.95%, F: 88.35%, and Q: 0%. In comparison with machine learning and deep learning based state-of-the-art approaches, significant improvement in efficiency has been found.

Impact Statement—Automated classifications of heartbeats from ECG signals are very much required to speed up the diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). Our study demonstrates 98.21% accuracy compared to existing state-of-the-art approaches. This study impacts the intensive health care system by offering an easy, quick, and cost-effective diagnosis of CVDs. Besides, remote patients can also receive the treatments timely. Early intervention and prevention of CVDs can prevent almost 30% of the total death every year. The proposed approach has a societal and economic impact too, as the health, welfare, and productivity of the citizens as well as of the country will be improved significantly. Approximately 2% of gross domestic product (GDP) will be improved across low- and middle-income countries as the proposed approaches will reduce the direct (treatment cost) and indirect costs (loss in productivities at workplaces) associated with CVDs.