MACHINE LEARNING APPROACH TO DETECT ECG ABNORMALITIES USING COST-SENSITIVE DECISION TREE CLASSIFIER

Abstract

Cardiac Arrhythmia is an abnormal heart rhythm that develops when the electrical impulses control the heart’s contraction which does not function properly. The heart can beat too fast (tachycardia), too slow (bradycardia), or in an irregular pattern. Observing ECG signal peaks and channels freehand is difficult due to their ingenious modification. Automated detection of cardiovascular abnormalities is preferred for the early diagnosis of cardiac disorders. This paper used machine learning approaches for detecting ECG abnormality utilizing a Support Vector Machine (SVM) and Cost-Sensitive Decision-Tree (CS-DT) classifier. The Empirical Mode Decomposition approach was utilized to examine the properties of R-peaks and QRS complexes in ECG signs. Various morphological characteristics are analyzed from the signal penetrated by the classifier to diagnose the irregular beats. A set of twenty-two clinically feasible features comprising temporal, morphological, and statistical were extracted from the processed ECG signals and applied to the classifier to categorize cardiovascular irregularities like Normal (N), Left Bundle Branch Block (LBBB), Right Bundle Branch Block (RBBB), Atrial Premature Beats (APB), and Premature Ventricular Contraction (PVC). The Beth Israel Hospital at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT-BIH) dataset has been used for this work, where feature datasets are split into training and evaluation subsets. The training set is used to train machine learning models on the extracted features, while the evaluation set is used to assess the performance of the trained models. The evaluation metrics such as Accuracy (Acc), Sensitivity (Se), Specificity (Sp), and Positive Predictivity (Pp), are frequently used to evaluate the model’s performance in Arrhythmia detection along with classification. The simulation has been conducted using SVM and CS-DT classifier with performance for all individual class labels at a Confidence Factor (CF) of 0.5. The performance of the time and frequency domain features is merged resulting in higher classification of Sensitivity, Specificity, Positive Predictivity, and Accuracy of 89.5%, 98.11%, 87.76%, and 96.8% in SVM, 97.71%, 99.58%, 97.66%, 99.32% in CS-DT classifier in identifying the irregular heartbeats.