Active Learning Methods for Electrocardiographic Signal Classification

• Published in: IEEE transactions on information technology in biomedicine Vol. 14; no. 6; pp. 1405 - 1416
• Main Authors: Pasolli, E, Melgani, F
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States IEEE 01.11.2010
• Subjects: Accuracy; Active learning; Algorithms; Artificial Intelligence; Classification algorithms; Computer Simulation; Databases, Factual; electrocardiographic (ECG) signal classification; Electrocardiography; Electrocardiography - classification; Electrocardiography - methods; Humans; Learning methods; Pattern classification; Principal Component Analysis; Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted; support vector machine (SVM); Support vector machines; Training
• ISSN: 1089-7771; 1558-0032
• DOI: 10.1109/TITB.2010.2048922

In this paper, we present three active learning strategies for the classification of electrocardiographic (ECG) signals. Starting from a small and suboptimal training set, these learning strategies select additional beat samples from a large set of unlabeled data. These samples are labeled manually, and then added to the training set. The entire procedure is iterated until the construction of a final training set representative of the considered classification problem. The proposed methods are based on support vector machine classification and on the: 1) margin sampling; 2) posterior probability; and 3) query by committee principles, respectively. To illustrate their performance, we conducted an experimental study based on both simulated data and real ECG signals from the MIT-BIH arrhythmia database. In general, the obtained results show that the proposed strategies exhibit a promising capability to select samples that are significant for the classification process, i.e., to boost the accuracy of the classification process while minimizing the number of involved labeled samples.