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I. INTRODUCTION
OR SEVERAL years, the automatic classification of electrocardiogram (ECG) signals has received great attention
from the biomedical engineering community. This is mainly due
to the fact that ECG provides cardiologists with useful information about the rhythm and functioning of the heart. Therefore, its
analysis represents an efficient way to detect and treat different
kinds of cardiac diseases.
Manuscript received June 21, 2007; revised December 31, 2007 and
March 4, 2008. First published April 11, 2008; current version published
September 4, 2008.
F. Melgani is with the Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science, University of Trento, I-38050 Trento, Italy (e-mail: melgani@
disi.unitn.it).
Y. Bazi is with the College of Engineering, Al Jouf University, Al Jouf 2014,
Saudi Arabia, (e-mail: yakoub.bazi@ju.edu.sa).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TITB.2008.923147
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The rest of the paper is organized as follows. The basic mathematical formulation of SVMs for solving binary and multiclass
classification problems is recalled in Section II. The main concepts and principles of PSO are introduced in Section III. The
proposed PSOSVM classification system is described in Section IV. The experimental results obtained on ECG data from
the Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyBeth Israel Hospital
(MITBIH) arrhythmia database [17] are reported in Sections V
and VI. Finally, conclusions are drawn in Section VII.
II. SUPPORT VECTOR MACHINES
Let us first consider, for simplicity, a supervised binary classification problem. Let us assume that the training set consists of
N vectors xi d (i = 1, 2, . . . , N ) from the d-dimensional
feature space X. To each vector xi , we associate a target
yi {1, +1}. The linear SVM classification approach consists of looking for a separation between the two classes in X by
means of an optimal hyperplane that maximizes the separating
margin [11]. In the nonlinear case, which is the most commonly
used as data are often linearly nonseparable, the two classes are
first mapped with a kernel method in a higher dimensional fea
ture space, i.e., (X) d (d > d). The membership decision
rule is based on the function sign[f (x)], where f (x) represents
the discriminant function associated with the hyperplane in the
transformed space and is defined as
f (x) = w (x) + b .
(1)
1
w2 + C
i .
2
i=1
N
(w, ) =
(2)
i = 1, 2, . . . , N
(3)
and
i 0,i
= 1, 2, . . . , N
(4)
N
i=1
N
1
i j yi yj K(xi , xj )
2 i,j =1
(5)
for i = 1, 2, . . . , N
(6)
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MELGANI AND BAZI: CLASSIFICATION OF ECG SIGNALS WITH SVMs AND PSO
and
N
i yi = 0
(7)
i=1
where = [1 , 2 , . . . , N ] is the vector of Lagrange multipliers and K(, ) is a kernel function. The final result is a
discriminant function conveniently expressed as a function of
the data in the original (lower) dimensional feature space X
i yi K(xi , x) + b .
(8)
f (x) =
iS
The set S is a subset of the indexes {1, 2, . . . , N } corresponding to the nonzero Lagrange multipliers i s, which define
the so-called SVs. The kernel K(,) must satisfy the condition
stated in Mercers theorem so as to correspond to some type
of inner product in the transformed (higher) dimensional feature space (X) [11]. A typical example of such kernels is
represented by the following Gaussian function:
K(xi , x) = exp(xi x2 )
(9)
669
all other individuals in the same population. During the iterative search process in the d-dimensional solution space, each
particle (i.e., candidate solution) will adjust its flying velocity
and position according to its own flying experience as well as
those of the other companion particles in the swarm. PSO has
proved promising in solving a number of engineering problems
such as automatic control [20], antenna design [21], and inverse
problems [22]. In the following, we will briefly describe the
main concepts of the basic PSO algorithm.
Let us consider a swarm of size S. Each particle Pi (i =
1, 2, . . . , S) in the swarm is characterized by: 1) its current position pi (t) d , which refers to a candidate solution of the
optimization problem at iteration T ; 2) its velocity vi (t) d ;
and 3) the best position pbi (t) d identified during its past
trajectory. Let pg (t) d be the best global position found over
all trajectories traveled by the particles of the swarm. Position
optimality is measured by means of one or more fitness functions defined in relation to the considered optimization problem.
During the search process, the particles move according to the
following equations:
vi (t + 1) = wvi (t) + c1 r1 (t) (pbi (t) pi (t))
+ c2 r2 (t) (pg (t) pi (t))
pi (t + 1) = pi (t) + vi (t)
(10)
(11)
where r1 () and r2 () are random variables drawn from a uniform distribution in the range [0,1] so as to provide a stochastic
weighting of the different components participating in the particle velocity definition. c1 and c2 are two acceleration constants
regulating the relative velocities with respect to the best global
and local positions, respectively. In greater detail, these parameters are considered as scaling factors that determine the relative
pull of the best position of the particle and the global best position. Sometimes, it is referred to them as the cognitive and social
rates, respectively. They are factors determining how much the
particle is influenced by the memory of its best location and
by the rest of the swarm, respectively. The inertia weight w
is used as a tradeoff between the global and local exploration
capabilities of the swarm. Large values of this parameter permit better global exploration, while small values lead to a fine
search in the solution space. Equation (10) allows the computation of the velocity at iteration T + 1 for each particle in the
swarm by combining linearly its current velocity (at iteration
T ) and the distances that separate the current particle position
from its best previous position and the best global position,
respectively. The particle position is updated with (11). Both
(10) and (11) are iterated until convergence of the search process is reached. Typical convergence criteria are based on the
iterative behavior of the best value of the adopted fitness function(s) or/and simply on a user-defined maximum number of
iterations.
IV. PROPOSED PSOSVM CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM
In this section, we describe the proposed SVM system for
the classification of ECG signals. As mentioned in the Introduction, the aim of this system is to optimize the SVM classifier
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(i = 1, 2, . . . , S).
(12)
2) Search process
Step 5) Detect the best global position pg in the swarm
exhibiting the minimal value of the considered
fitness function over all explored trajectories.
Step 6) Update the speed of each particle using (10).
Step 7) Update the position of each particle using (11). If a
particle goes beyond the predefined boundaries of
the search space, truncate the updating by setting
the position of the particle at the space boundary
and reverse its search direction (i.e., multiply its
speed vector by 1). This will stop the particles
from further attempting to go out of the allowed
search space.
Step 8) For each candidate particle pi (i = 1, 2, . . . , S),
train an SVM classifier and compute the corresponding fitness function f (i).
Step 9) Update the best position pbi of each particle if its
current position pi (i = 1, 2, . . . , S) has a smaller
fitness function.
3) Convergence
Step 10) If the maximum number of iterations is not yet
reached, return to step 5).
4) Classification
Step 11) Select the best global position pg in the swarm
and train an SVM classifier fed with the subset
of detected features mapped by pg and modeled
with the values of the two parameters C and
encoded in the same position.
Step 12) Classify the ECG signals with the trained SVM
classifier.
C. Extension to Multiclass Classification Problems
Extension of the proposed system to address multiclass classification problems is made by adopting the OAA strategy described in Section II. For a problem with a set of T classes
= {w1 , w2 , . . . , wT }, this means that an ensemble of T binary SVM classifiers should be optimized according to the PSO
procedure described in the previous section. Therefore, the proposed approach will automatically detect the features and determine the two model parameter values for each binary SVM classifier defined to discriminate between class wi (i = 1, 2, . . . , T )
and all others (i.e., {wi }). During the classification phase,
the winner-takes-all rule is used to produce the final decision.
Note that, though we adopted the OAA strategy as a multiclass
strategy, other strategies could also be considered, thanks to the
general nature of the proposed PSOSVM classification system.
V. EXPERIMENTAL DESIGN
A. Dataset Description
Our experiments were conducted on the basis of ECG data
from the MITBIH arrhythmia database [17]. In particular, the
considered beats refer to the following classes: normal sinus
rhythm (N ), atrial premature beat (A), ventricular premature
beat (V ), right bundle branch block (RB), left bundle branch
block (LB), and paced beat (/). The beats were selected from
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MELGANI AND BAZI: CLASSIFICATION OF ECG SIGNALS WITH SVMs AND PSO
671
Fig. 1. Two-dimensional distribution of the six considered classes in the subspace formed by the best couple of features obtained with the PCA algorithm.
For better visualization, just 25 samples were randomly selected for each class.
(13)
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TABLE I
NUMBERS OF TRAINING AND TEST BEATS USED IN THE EXPERIMENTS
TABLE II
OVERALL (OA), AVERAGE (AA), AND CLASS PERCENTAGE ACCURACIES ACHIEVED ON THE TEST BEATS WITH
THE DIFFERENT INVESTIGATED CLASSIFIERS WITH A TOTAL NUMBER OF 500 TRAINING BEATS
C. Experiment Settings
In the experiments, we considered the nonlinear SVM based
on the popular Gaussian kernel (referred to as SVM-RBF or
simply SVM). The related parameters C and for this kernel were varied in the arbitrarily fixed ranges [103 , 200] and
[103 , 2] so as to cover high and small regularization of the classification model, and fat as well as thin kernels, respectively. In
addition, for comparison purpose, we implemented, in the first
experiment, the SVM classifier with two other kernels, which
are the linear and the polynomial kernels, leading thus to two
other SVM classifiers termed as SVM-linear and SVM-poly,
respectively. The degree d of the polynomial kernel was varied
in the range [2,5] in order to span polynomials with low and
high flexibility. The K value and the number of hidden nodes
(h) of the kNN and the RBF classifiers were tuned in the arbitrarily fixed intervals [1,15] and [10,60], respectively. The other
RBF parameters, which include the center and the width of each
RBF (kernel), were computed by applying the K-means clustering algorithm separately to each class [26]. Concerning the
PSO algorithm, we considered the following standard parameters: swarm size S = 40, inertia weight w = 0.4, acceleration
constants c1 and c2 equal to the unity, and maximum number of
iterations fixed at 40.
VI. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
A. Experiment 1: Classification in the Whole Original
Hyperdimensional Feature Space
As mentioned earlier, in this experiment, we applied the SVM
classifier directly on the entire original hyperdimensional feature space, which is made up of 303 features. During the training
phase, the SVM parameters were selected according to a m-fold
cross-validation (CV) procedure [27], first by randomly splitting the 500 training beats into m mutually exclusive subsets
(folds) of equal size, and then, by training m times an SVM
classifier modeled with predefined values: C for the linear kernel, (C and ) for the Gaussian kernel, and (C and d) for the
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MELGANI AND BAZI: CLASSIFICATION OF ECG SIGNALS WITH SVMs AND PSO
673
feature subspaces of various dimensionalities. The desired number of features varied from 10 to 50 with a step of 10, namely,
from small to high-dimensional feature subspaces. Feature reduction was achieved by the traditional PCA algorithm, commonly used in ECG signal classification. It is based on the idea
to select the first component (i.e., the direction of maximum
variance), then the second component (direction of second maximum variance), and so on, up to the desired number of components, which will compose the considered feature subspace.
Fig. 2(a) depicts the results obtained in terms of OA by the
three considered classifiers combined with the PCA algorithm,
namely, the PCASVM, the PCARBF, and the PCAkNN classifiers. In particular, it can be seen that for all feature subspace
dimensionalities except the lowest (i.e., 10 features), the PCA
SVM classifier maintains a clear superiority over the other two.
Its best accuracy was found using a feature subspace made up of
the first 30 components. The corresponding OA and AA accuracies were 87.57% and 88.92%, respectively. Comparing these
results with those achieved with the SVM classifier based on
the Gaussian kernel in the original feature space (i.e., without
feature reduction), a slight decrease of 0.19% in terms of OA
and an increase of 1.44% in terms of AA was obtained (see
Table II). As regards the PCAkNN and the PCARBF classifiers, the best empirical numbers of features were found to be
20 and 30, respectively. The corresponding OA and AA accuracies were 84% and 82.83% for the PCAkNN classifier, and
83.54% and 83.01% for the PCARBF, respectively. Note from
Table II that the PCAkNN classifier behaves much better with
20 features than in the original hyperdimensional feature space.
From this experiment, we can make three observations: 1) the
SVM classifier shows a relatively low sensitivity to the curse
of dimensionality as compared to the kNN and the RBF classifiers [see Table III(a)]; 2) the SVM classifier still preserve its
superiority when integrated in a feature reduction-based classification scheme; and 3) though the SVM performs well in the
whole original feature space, its accuracy can still be improved
provided that a subspace of higher generalization capability can
be found.
C. Experiment 3: Classification With PSOSVM
As described in Section IV, the proposed PSOSVM classification system aims at enhancing the SVM classification process
from two different viewpoints: 1) by automatically detecting a
feature subspace of higher generalization capability in order to
deal in a more effective way with the curse of dimensionality,
instead of reducing the dimension of the original feature space
basing on PCA or simply on feature sampling as done in the
literature [1], [3], [5], [10] and 2) by passing from an empirical
tuning of the value of the two SVM parameters to their automatic
optimization. This experiment is aimed at assessing the effectiveness of this methodological enhancement. To this purpose,
we applied the PSOSVM classifier to the available training
beats. Note that each particle of the swarm was defined by position and velocity vectors of a dimension of 305. At convergence
of the optimization process, we assessed the PSOSVM classifier accuracy on the test samples. The achieved overall and
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TABLE III
STATISTICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF DIFFERENCES IN CLASSIFICATION ACCURACY BETWEEN THE NINE INVESTIGATED CLASSIFIERS
EXPRESSED BY MEANS OF THE MCNEMARS TEST WITH A TOTAL OF (a) 500, (b) 250, AND (c) 750 TRAINING BEATS
TABLE IV
NUMBER OF FEATURES DETECTED FOR EACH CLASS WITH THE PSOSVM
CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM TRAINED ON 500 BEATS
and maximum numbers of features were obtained for the ventricular premature (V ) and normal (N ) classes with 35 and 63
features, respectively.
D. Experiment 4: Sensitivity to the Number of Training Beats
In this experiment, we repeated the previous three experiments while decreasing and increasing the training set size by
50%. In particular, we considered two experimental scenarios
characterized by a total number of 250 and 750 training beats,
respectively. Table V(a) and (b) shows the results achieved with
all nine investigated classifiers (SVM-linear, SVM-poly, SVM
RBF, kNN, RBF, PCASVM, PCAkNN, PCARBF, and PSO
SVM) for these two scenarios, i.e., for 250 and 750 training
beats, respectively. Similarly, Fig. 2(b) and (c) shows the trend
of the OA provided by the PCASVM, the PCAkNN, and the
PCARBF classifiers on varying the number of features from
10 to 50.
In general, as could be expected, reducing the number of
training beats involved a more or less significant decrease
in accuracy depending on the classifier. In terms of OA, the
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MELGANI AND BAZI: CLASSIFICATION OF ECG SIGNALS WITH SVMs AND PSO
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TABLE V
OVERALL (OA), AVERAGE (AA), AND CLASS PERCENTAGE ACCURACIES ACHIEVED ON THE TEST BEATS WITH
THE DIFFERENT EXPLORED CLASSIFIERS WITH A TOTAL NUMBER OF (a) 250 AND (b) 750 TRAINING BEATS
TABLE VI
OVERALL (OA) AND AVERAGE (AA) ACCURACIES ACHIEVED ON THE TEST
BEATS BY THE PSOSVM CLASSIFICATION SYSTEM FOR DIFFERENT VALUES
OF (a) INERTIA WEIGHT w VARIED IN THE RANGE [0,1] (c 1 AND c 2 WERE SET
TO 1) AND (b) ACCELERATION CONSTANTS c 1 AND c 2 TUNED IN THE RANGE
[1,2] [w WAS FIXED AT 0.6, WHICH IS THE BEST VALUE FOUND IN (a)]
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MELGANI AND BAZI: CLASSIFICATION OF ECG SIGNALS WITH SVMs AND PSO
Farid Melgani (M04SM06) received the State Engineer degree in electronics from the University of
Batna, Batna, Algeria, in 1994, the M.Sc. degree in
electrical engineering from the University of Baghdad, Baghdad, Iraq, in 1999, and the Ph.D. degree in
electronic and computer engineering from the University of Genoa, Genoa, Italy, in 2003.
From 1999 to 2002, he was with the Signal Processing and Telecommunications Group, Department
of Biophysical and Electronic Engineering, University of Genoa. Since 2002, he has been with the University of Trento, Trento, Italy, where he is an Assistant Professor of Telecommunications, and currently, the Head of the Intelligent Information Processing (I2P)
Laboratory, Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science. His
current research interests include processing, pattern recognition, and machine
learning techniques applied to remote sensing and biomedical signals/images
(classification, regression, multitemporal analysis, and data fusion). He is the
author or coauthor of more than 80 scientific papers and is a referee for several
international journals.
Dr. Melgani was on the scientific committees of several international conferences and is an Associate Editor of the IEEE GEOSCIENCE AND REMOTE
SENSING LETTERS.
677
Yakoub Bazi (S05M07) received the State Engineer and M.Sc. degrees in electronics from the University of Batna, Batna, Algeria, in 1994 and 2000,
respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in information and
communication technology from the University of
Trento, Trento, Italy, in 2005.
From 2000 to 2002, he was a Lecturer at the University of Msila, Msila, Algeria. From January 2006
to June 2006, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher at the
University of Trento. He is currently an Assistant
Professor in the College of Engineering, Al Jouf University, Al Jouf, Saudi Arabia. His current research interests include pattern
recognition and evolutionary computation methodologies applied to remote
sensing images and biomedical signal/images (change detection, classification,
and semisupervised learning).
Dr. Bazi is a Referee for several international journals.
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