Pruned fuzzy K-nearest neighbor classifier for beat classification

Arrhythmia beat classification is an active area of research in ECG based clinical decision support systems. In this paper, Pruned Fuzzy K-nearest neighbor (PFKNN) classifier is proposed to classify six types of beats present in the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia database. We have tested our classifier on ~ 103100 beats for six beat types present in the database. Fuzzy KNN (FKNN) can be implemented very easily but large number of training examples used for classification can be very time consuming and requires large storage space. Hence, we have proposed a time efficient Arif-Fayyaz pruning algorithm especially suitable for FKNN which can maintain good classification accuracy with appropriate retained ratio of training data. By using Arif-Fayyaz pruning algorithm with Fuzzy KNN, we have achieved a beat classification accuracy of 97% and geometric mean of sensitivity of 94.5% with only 19% of the total training examples. The accuracy and sensitivity is comparable to FKNN when all the training data is used. Principal Component Analysis is used to further reduce the dimension of feature space from eleven to six without compromising the accuracy and sensitivity. PFKNN was found to robust against noise present in the ECG data.