HEARTBEAT CLASSIFICATION USING SUPPORT VECTOR MACHINES (SVMs) WITH AN EMBEDDED REJECT OPTION

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a new system for ECG beat classification using support vector machines classifier with a double hinge loss. The proposed classifier rejects samples that cannot be classified with enough confidence. Specifically in medical diagnoses, the consequence of a wrong classification can be so harmful that it is convenient to reject such sample. After ECG preprocessing, feature selection and extraction, our decision rule uses dynamic reject thresholds according to the cost of rejecting or misclassifying a sample. Significant performance enhancement is observed when the proposed approach is tested with the MIT-BIH arrythmia database. The achieved results are represented by the error reject tradeoff. We obtained 98.2% of sensitivity with no rejection and more than 99% of sensitivity for the optimal classification cost being competitive to other published studies.