Multi-type Arrhythmia Classification: Assessment of the Potential of Time and Frequency Domain Features and Different Classifiers

Atrial fibrillation (AF) is associated with significant risk of heart failure and consequent death. Its episodic appearance, the wide variety of arrhythmias exhibiting irregular AF-like RR intervals and noises accompanying the ECG acquisition, impede the reliable AF detection. Therefore, the Computing in Cardiology Challenge 2017 organizers encourage the development of methods for classification of short, single-lead ECG as AF, normal sinus rhythm (NSR), other rhythm (OR), or noisy signal (NOISE). This study presents a set of 118 time and frequency domain feature including descriptors of the RR and PP intervals; QRS and P-wave amplitudes; ECG behavior within the TQ intervals, deviation of the TQ and PQRST segments from their first principle component analysis vector; dominant frequency; regularity index, width and area of the power spectrum estimated for the ECG signal with eliminated QRS complexes. Three classification techniques have been applied over the 118 ECG features – linear discriminant analysis (LDA), classification tree (CT) and neural network (NN) approach. The scores over a test subset are: (i) FNSR = 0.81; FAF = 0.61; FOR = 0.53, F1 = 0.65 for CT, which is the most simple model; (ii) FNSR = 0.82; FAF = 0.62; FOR = 0.53, F1 = 0.66 for LDA, which is the model with the most reproducible accuracy results; (iii) FNSR = 0.86; FAF = 0.74; FOR = 0.57, F1 = 0.72 for NN, which is the most accurate model.