A Deep Multi-Task Learning Approach for Bioelectrical Signal Analysis

Deep learning is a promising technique for bioelectrical signal analysis, as it can automatically discover hidden features from raw data without substantial domain knowledge. However, training a deep neural network requires a vast amount of labeled samples. Additionally, a well-trained model may be sensitive to the study object, and its performance may deteriorate sharply when transferred to other study objects. We propose a deep multi-task learning approach for bioelectrical signal analysis to address these issues. Explicitly, we define two distinct scenarios, the consistent source-target scenario and the inconsistent source-target scenario based on the motivation and purpose of the tasks. For each scenario, we present methods to decompose the original task and dataset into multiple subtasks and sub-datasets. Correspondingly, we design the generic deep parameter-sharing neural networks to solve the multi-task learning problem and illustrate the details of implementation with one-dimension convolutional neural networks (1D CNN), vanilla recurrent neural networks (RNN), recurrent neural networks with long short-term memory units (LSTM), and recurrent neural networks with gated recurrent units (GRU). In these two scenarios, we conducted extensive experiments on four electrocardiogram (ECG) databases. The results demonstrate the benefits of our approach, showing that our proposed method can improve the accuracy of ECG data analysis (up to 5.2%) in the MIT-BIH arrhythmia database.