Hybrid Support Vector Machine for imbalanced data in multiclass arrhythmia classification

Automatically classifying ECG recordings for arrhythmia is difficult since even normal ECG signals exhibit irregularities, and learning algorithms suffer from class imbalance. We propose a hybrid SVM to combat class imbalance rampant in biomedical signals. Consequently, we significantly reduce the number patients falsely classified as normal. The Hybrid SVM is suitable for a variety of multiclass problems; here, we used the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia database, and the position and magnitude of local singularities as features. We enhance relevant singularity-driven Holder features proposed earlier; while the use of these features results in higher accuracy, using the Hybrid SVM shows even more gains.