Usage of eigenvector methods in implementation of automated diagnostic systems for ECG beats

In this paper, implementation of automated diagnostic systems with diverse and composite features for electrocardiogram (ECG) beats was presented and their accuracies were determined. In practical applications of pattern recognition, there are often diverse features extracted from raw data which needs recognizing. Methods of combining multiple classifiers with diverse features are viewed as a general problem in various application areas of pattern recognition. Because of the importance of making the right decision, better classification procedures were searched for ECG beats. Four types of ECG beats (normal beat, congestive heart failure beat, ventricular tachyarrhythmia beat, atrial fibrillation beat) obtained from the Physiobank database were analyzed. The classification accuracies of six different classifiers, namely multilayer perceptron neural network (MLPNN), combined neural network (CNN), mixture of experts (ME), modified mixture of experts (MME), probabilistic neural network (PNN), and support vector machine (SVM), which were trained on diverse or composite features were compared. Decision making was performed in two stages: feature extraction by eigenvector methods and classification using the classifiers trained on the extracted features. The research demonstrated that the SVM trained on composite feature and the MME trained on diverse features achieved accuracy rates which were higher than that of the other automated diagnostic systems.