Active learning methods for electrocardiographic signal classification

In this paper, we present three active learning strategies for the classification of electrocardiographic (ECG) signals. Starting from a small and suboptimal training set, these learning strategies select additional beat samples from a large set of unlabeled data. These samples are labeled manually, and then added to the training set. The entire procedure is iterated until the construction of a final training set representative of the considered classification problem. The proposed methods are based on support vector machine classification and on the: 1) margin sampling; 2) posterior probability; and 3) query by committee principles, respectively. To illustrate their performance, we conducted an experimental study based on both simulated data and real ECG signals from the MIT-BIH arrhythmia database. In general, the obtained results show that the proposed strategies exhibit a promising capability to select samples that are significant for the classification process, i.e., to boost the accuracy of the classification process while minimizing the number of involved labeled samples.