Arrhythmia Classification Based on Multiple Features Fusion and Random Forest Using ECG

Cardiovascular diseases have become more and more prominent in recent years, which have proven to be a major threat to people's health. Accurate detection of arrhythmia in patients has important implications for clinical treatment. The aim of this study was to propose a novel automatic classification method for arrhythmia in order to improve classification accuracy. The electrocardiogram (ECG) signal was subjected preprocessing for denoising purposes using a wavelet transform. Then, the local and global characteristics of the beat, which contained RR interval features according with the clinical diagnosis criterion, morphology features based on wavelet packet decomposition and statistical features along with kurtosis coefficient, skewness coefficient and variance are exploited and fused. Meanwhile, the dimensionality of wavelet packet coefficients were reduced via principal component analysis (PCA). Finally, these features were used as the input of the random forest classifier to train the model and were then compared with the support vector machine (SVM) and back propagation (BP) neural networks. Based on 100,647 beats from the MIT-BIH database, the proposed method achieved an average accuracy, specificity and sensitivity of 99.08%, 99.00% and 89.31%, respectively, using the intra-patient beats, and 92.31%, 89.98% and 37.47%, respectively, using the inter-patient beats. Moreover, two classification schemes, namely, inter-patient and intra-patient scheme, were validated. Compared with the other methods referred to in this paper, the performance of the novel method yielded better results.