Enhanced electrocardiogram machine learning-based classification with emphasis on fusion and unknown heartbeat classes

Building an electrocardiogram (ECG) heartbeat classification model is essential for early arrhythmia detection. This research aims to build a reliable model that can classify heartbeats into five heartbeat types: normal beat (N), supraventricular ectopic beat (SVEB), ventricular ectopic beat (VEB), fusion beat (F), and unknown beat (Q), with a focus on enhancing the predictions of the uncommon Q and F heartbeats. The base dataset used is the MIT-BIH SupraVentricular Database, which was used to train and compare the performance of five machine learning models: logistic regression, Random Forest (RF), K-nearest neighbor, linear support vector machine, and linear discriminant analysis. In addition to using the synthetic minority oversampling technique, data extracted from multiple databases for the F and Q classes were combined with the original base dataset. These methods resulted in significant improvement in the recall for the rare F and Q classes when compared to the literature. The RF algorithm produced the best performance with an accuracy of 97% and recall values equal to 97%, 93%, 95%, 95%, and 30% for N, SVEB, VEB, F, and Q, respectively.