Identification and classification of arrhythmic heartbeats from electrocardiogram signals using feature induced optimal extreme gradient boosting algorithm

Arrhythmic heartbeat classification has gained a lot of attention to accelerate the detection of cardiovascular diseases and mitigating the potential cause of one-third of deaths worldwide. In this article, a computer-aided diagnostic (CAD) approach has been proposed for the automated identification and classification of arrhythmic heartbeats from electrocardiogram (ECG) signals using multiple features aided supervised learning model. For proper diagnosis of arrhythmic heartbeats, MIT-BIH Arrhythmia database has been used to train and test the proposed approach. The ECG signals, extracted from sensor leads, have undergone pre-processing via discrete wavelet transform. Three sets of features, i.e. statistical, temporal, and spectral, are extracted from the processed ECG signals followed by random forest aided recursive feature elimination strategy to select the prominent features for proper classification of arrhythmic heartbeats by the proposed optimal extreme gradient boosting (O-XGBoost) classifier. Hyperparameters such as learning rate, tree-specific parameters, and regularization parameters have been optimized to improve the performance of the XGBoost classifier. Moreover, the synthetic minority over-sampling technique has been employed for balancing the dataset in order to improve the classification performance. Quantitative results reveal the remarkable performance over state-of-the-art methods. The proposed model can be implemented in any computer-aided diagnostic system with similar topological structures.