Towards Prediction of Heart Arrhythmia Onset Using Machine Learning

Current study aims at prediction of the onset of malignant cardiac arrhythmia in patients with Implantable Cardioverter-Defibrillators (ICDs) using Machine Learning algorithms. The input data consisted of 184 signals of RR-intervals from 29 patients with ICD, recorded both during normal heartbeat and arrhythmia. For every signal we generated 47 descriptors with different signal analysis methods. Then, we performed feature selection using several methods and used selected feature for building predictive models with the help of Random Forest algorithm. Entire modelling procedure was performed within 5-fold cross-validation procedure that was repeated 10 times. Results were stable and repeatable. The results obtained (AUC = 0.82, MCC = 0.45) are statistically significant and show that RR intervals carry information about arrhythmia onset. The sample size used in this study was too small to build useful medical predictive models, hence large data sets should be explored to construct models of sufficient quality to be of direct utility in medical practice.