The Effects of Daubechies Wavelet Basis Function (DWBF) and Decomposition Level on the Performance of Artificial Intelligence-Based Atrial Fibrillation (AF) Detection Based on Electrocardiogram (ECG) Signals

Abstract

This research studies the effects of both Daubechies wavelet basis function (DWBF) and decomposition level (DL) on the performance of detecting atrial fibrillation (AF) based on electrocardiograms (ECGs). ECG signals (consisting of 23 AF data and 18 normal data from MIT-BIH) were decomposed at various levels using several types of DWBF to obtain four wavelet coefficient features (WCFs), namely, minimum (min), maximum (max), mean, and standard deviation (stdev). These features were then classified to detect the presence of AF using a support vector machine (SVM) classifier. Distribution of training and testing data for the SVM uses the 5-fold cross-validation (CV) principle to produce optimum detection performance. In this study, AF detection performance is measured and analyzed based on accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity metrics. The results of the analysis show that accuracy tends to decrease with increases in the decomposition level. In addition, it becomes stable in various types of DWBF. For both sensitivity and specificity, the results of the analysis show that increasing the decomposition level also causes a decrease in both sensitivity and specificity. However, unlike the accuracy, changing the DWBF type causes both two metrics to fluctuate over a wider range. The statistical results also indicate that the highest AF accuracy detection (i.e., 94.17%) is obtained at the Daubechies 2 (DB2) function with a decomposition level of 4, whereas the highest sensitivity, 97.57%, occurs when the AF detection uses DB6 with a decomposition level of 2. Finally, DB2 with decomposition level 4 results in 96.750% for specificity. The finding of this study is that selecting the appropriate DL has a more significant effect than DWBF on AF detection using WCF.