InterCriteria Analysis: Application for ECG Data Analysis

The InterCriteria Analysis (ICrA) is based on the mathematical formalisms of index matrices and intuitionistic fuzzy sets. It has been elaborated to discern possible similarities in the behavior of criteria pairs when multiple objects are considered, allowing also the accounting of information uncertainty. The focus of this study is to validate the applicability of ICrA over a large set of ECG criteria extracted for arrhythmia analysis and to evaluate its ability to support the pre-selection of criteria that could be further involved in decision making procedures. ICrA is applied over 88 ECG criteria (resulting in 3828 criteria pairs) calculated for 8528 ECGs from PhysioNet/CinC Challenge 2017 database. Three criteria pairs show strong positive consonance, another 26—positive consonance, while another 15 are in negative consonance. ICrA also reveals lack of dependencies in 98 criteria pairs. The correspondence between our observations (high degrees of agreement/disagreement and lack of dependencies) and our expectations based on knowledge of the principles involved in the computation of the ECG criteria validates the application of ICrA for reliable evaluation of the relation between different criteria. This potential of ICrA to highlight useful relations between ECG criteria makes it suitable in the ECG pre-processing stage for criteria pre-selection. Thus, optimization of the feature space could be achieved together with minimization of the computations’ complexity.