Accurate classification of ECG patterns with subject-dependent feature vector

Abstract

Correct and accurate classification of ECG patterns in a long-term record requires optimal selection of feature vector. We propose a machine learning algorithm that learns from short randomly selected signal strips and, having an approval from a human operator, classifies all remaining patterns. We applied a genetic algorithm with aggressive mutation to select few most distinctive features of ECG signal. When applied to the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database records, the algorithm reduced the initial feature space of 57 elements to 3–5 features optimized for a particular subject. We also observe a significant reduction of misclassified beats percentage (from 2.7% to 0.7% in average for SVM classifier and three features) with regard to automatic correlation-based selection.