An Empiric Analysis of Wavelet-Based Feature Extraction on Deep Learning and Machine Learning Algorithms for Arrhythmia Classification

The aberration in human electrocardiogram (ECG) affects cardiovascular events that may lead to arrhythmias. Many automation systems for ECG classification exist, but the ambiguity to wisely employ the in-built feature extraction or expert based manual feature extraction before classification still needs recognition. The proposed work compares and presents the enactment of using machine learning and deep learning classification on time series sequences. The two classifiers, namely the Support Vector Machine (SVM) and the Bi-directional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) network, are separately trained by direct ECG samples and extracted feature vectors using multiresolution analysis of Maximal Overlap Discrete Wavelet Transform (MODWT). Single beat segmentation with R-peaks and QRS detection is also involved with 6 morphological and 12 statistical feature extraction. The two benchmark datasets, multi-class, and binary class, are acquired from the PhysioNet database. For the binary dataset, BiLSTM with direct samples and with feature extraction gives 58.1% and 80.7% testing accuracy, respectively, whereas SVM outperforms with 99.88% accuracy. For the multi-class dataset, BiLSTM classification accuracy with the direct sample and the extracted feature is 49.6% and 95.4%, whereas SVM shows 99.44%. The efficient statistical workout depicts that the extracted feature-based selection of data can deliver distinguished outcomes compared with raw ECG data or in-built automatic feature extraction. The machine learning classifiers like SVM with knowledge-based feature extraction can equally or better perform than Bi-LSTM network for certain datasets.