A comparative study of heterogeneous machine learning algorithms for arrhythmia classification using feature selection technique and multi-dimensional datasets

Abstract

Arrhythmia, a common cardiovascular disorder, refers to the abnormal electrical activity within the heart, leading to irregular heart rhythms. This condition affects millions of people worldwide, with severe implications on cardiac function and overall health. Arrhythmias can strike anyone at any age which is a significant cause of morbidity and mortality on a global scale. About 80% of deaths related to heart disease are caused by ventricular arrhythmias. This research investigated the application of an optimized multi-objectives supervised Machine Learning (ML) models for early arrhythmia diagnosis. The authors evaluated the model’s performance on the arrhythmia dataset from the UCI ML repository with varying train-test splits (70:30, 80:20, and 90:10). Standard preprocessing techniques such as handling missing values, formatting, balancing, and directory analysis were applied along with Pearson correlation for feature selection, all aimed at enhancing model performance. The proposed optimized RF model achieved impressive performance metrics, including accuracy (95.24%), precision (100%), sensitivity (89.47%), and specificity (100%). Furthermore, the study compared the proposed approach to existing models, demonstrating significant improvements across various performance measures.