Arrhythmia detection using resampling and deep learning methods on unbalanced data

Due to cardiovascular diseases millions of people die around the world. One way to detect abnormality in the heart condition is with the help of electrocardiogram signal (ECG) analysis. This paper’s goal is to use machine learning and deep learning methods such as Support Vector Machines (SVM), Random Forests, Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LightGBM), Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BLSTM) to classify arrhythmias, where particular interest represent the rare cases of disease. In order to deal with the problem of imbalance in the dataset we used resampling methods such as SMOTE Tomek-Links and SMOTE ENN to improve the representation ration of the minority classes. Although the machine learning models did not improve a lot when trained on the resampled dataset, the deep learning models showed more impressive results. In particular, LSTM model fitted on dataset resampled using SMOTE ENN method provides the most optimal precision-recall trade-off for the minority classes Supraventricular beat and Fusion of ventricular and normal beat, with recall of 83% and 88% and precision of 74% and 66% for the two classes re-spectively, whereas the macro-weighted recall is 92% and precision is 82%.