Machine learning-data mining integrated approach for premature ventricular contraction prediction

Cardiac arrhythmias impose a significant burden on the healthcare environment due to the increasing ratio of mortality worldwide. Arrhythmia and abnormal ECG heartbeat are the possible symptoms of severe heart diseases that can lead to death. Premature ventricular contraction (PVC) is a common form of cardiac arrhythmia which begins from the lower chamber of the heart, and frequent occurrence of PVC beat might lead to mortality. ECG signals are the noninvasive and primary tool used to identify the actual life threat related to the heart. Nowadays, in society, the computer-assisted technique reduces doctors' burden to evaluate heart disease and heart arrhythmia automatically. Regardless of well-equipped and well-developed health facilities that are available for monitoring the cardiac condition, the success stories are yet unsatisfactorily due to the complexity of the cardiac disorder. The most challenging part in ECG signal analysis is to extract the accurate features relevant to the arrhythmia for classification due to the inter-patient variation. There are many morphological changes present in the ECG signals. Hence, there is a gap in the usage of appropriate methods for the extraction of features and classification models, which reduce the biased diagnosis of PVC arrhythmia. To predict PVC arrhythmia accurately is a quite challenging task owing to (a) QRS negative (b) long compensatory pause (c) p-wave (d) biased diagnosis of PVC detection due to the small feature set. This study presents a new approach for PVC prediction using derived predictor variables from the electrocardiograph (ECG-MLII) signals: R-R wave interval, previous R-R wave interval, QRS duration, and verification of P-wave whether it is present or absent using threshold technique. We propose the machine learning-data mining MACDM integrated approach using five different models of multiple logistic regression and four classifiers, namely, Random Forest (RF), K-Nearest Neighbor (KNN), Support vector machine (SVM), and Naive Bayes (NB). The experiment was conducted on the public benchmark MIT-BIH-AR to evaluate the performance of our proposed MACDM technique. The multiple logistic regression models constructed as a function of all independent variables achieved an accuracy of 99.96%, sensitivity 98.9%, specificity 99.20%, PPV 99.25%, and Youden's index parameter 98.24%. Thus, it is proved that this computer-aided method helps our medical practitioners improve the efficiency of their services.