Efficient ECG classification based on the probabilistic Kullback-Leibler divergence

Abstract

Diagnostic systems of cardiac arrhythmias face early and accurate detection challenges due to the overlap of electrocardiogram (ECG) patterns. Additionally, these systems must manage a huge number of features. This paper proposes a new classifier Kullback-Leibler classifier (KLC) that combines feature optimization and probabilistic Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence. Particle swarm optimization (PSO) is used for optimizing the features of ECG data, while KL divergence counts the variance between training and testing probability distributions. The proposed framework led the new classifier to distinguish normal and abnormal rhythms accurately. MIT-BIH Standard Arrhythmia Dataset (MIT-BIH) is used to test the validity of the proposed model. The experimental results show the proposed classifier achieves results in precision (86.67%), recall (86.67%), and F1_Score (86.5%).