Ensembled Feature based Multi-Label ECG Arrhythmia Classification

Arrhythmia is one of the major contributors to sudden cardiac death. Compared to single-label arrhythmia classification, multi-label classification provides the advantage of simultaneous detection of different cardiac ailments. Existing multi-label approaches employ deep learning models, which have several limitations, e.g., data dependency, overfitting, complexity, and lack of interpretability. In this work, we propose a multi-label classification framework with ensembled hand-crafted features added with label powerset, which better preserves the correlation between classes. Experimentation with CPSC 2018 database shows that the proposed model provides accuracy and F1-score of 88.52% and 88.45% for single-label data and 88.11% and 86.32% for multi-label data, respectively. The proposed method improves individual class performance for some important diseases compared to the existing multi-label state-of-the-art methods.Clinical relevance— Early detection of life-threatening multi-label ECG patterns consisting of atrial fibrillation, atrioventricular block, and right bundle branch block with high accuracy can reduce the sudden cardiac death rate.