Iranian Journal of Science and Technology, Transactions of Electrical Engineering (2023) 47:1635–1655

https://doi.org/10.1007/s40998-023-00633-6 (0123456789().,-volV)(0123456789().
,- volV)

RESEARCH PAPER

Heart Arrhythmia Detection and Classification: A Comparative Study

Using Deep Learning Models
Anuja Arora1 • Anu Taneja2 • Jude Hemanth3

Received: 7 July 2022 / Accepted: 19 June 2023 / Published online: 7 July 2023
Ó The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Shiraz University 2023

Abstract
The irregular functioning of heartbeats known as ‘‘Heart Arrhythmia’’ may lead to heart palpitations, blood clots, and even
a heart stroke. The ECG test is one of the primary clinical tests that are utilized to detect heart abnormalities due to its
noninvasive nature. However, this method is an extremely time-consuming process due to variations in ECG signals. The
main aim of this study is to automate this manual process as computer-aided detection can diagnose with more precision
and accuracy. This research study is a comparative study that detects and classifies arrhythmia using various deep learning
models that is a one-dimensional convolutional neural network, two-dimensional convolutional neural network (2D-CNN),
2D-CNN with long short-term memory network, and in addition to this, models are combined using ensemble learning to
develop a classifier. These classifiers help discriminate signs of arrhythmia disease. The idea is implemented on ECG
Heartbeat Categorization data, derived from the MIT-BIH arrhythmia dataset. The utilization of deep learning-based
methods helps to achieve promising results and show significant improvements as compared to baseline methods. This
study would benefit the medical experts in early arrhythmia diagnosis as faster detection can save more human lives.

Keywords Arrhythmia classification  Bagging  Convolutional neural network  Deep learning  ECG signals 
Long short-term memory network

1 Introduction atrium (two upper chambers) and ventricles (two lower

chambers). The flow of blood is restrained through syn-
Heart-related problems are one of the prevalent reasons chronized cycles of expansions and contractions of these
behind the increased mortality rate as early and precise four chambers. The slight delay in the expansions or con-
diagnosis of heart diseases is a major challenge. The heart tractions of the heart chambers can prove to be fatal for the
plays an important role in the circulation of blood human body. Heart Arrhythmia is also one of the heart
throughout the body, and it consists of four chambers: diseases that arise due to irregularities in the heartbeats
caused by the altered rate of expansions or contractions of
one or more of these heart chambers (Luz et al. 2016).
& Jude Hemanth There are distinct types of arrhythmias like atrial fibrilla-
judehemanth@karunya.edu
tion: it occurs, in case, atrial chambers beat rapidly; atrial
Anuja Arora flutter: it arises due to abnormal working from one of the
anuja.arora@jiit.ac.in
areas in the atrium; ventricle fibrillation: irregular heart
Anu Taneja rhythm occurs due to uncoordinated contractions of ven-
anutaneja16@gmail.com
tricles and many more (Jambukia et al. 2015). However, if
1
Department of Computer Science and Information an arrhythmia is not diagnosed timely or treated well, it can
Technology, Jaypee Institute of Information Technology, even result in heart failure.
Noida, Uttar Pradesh, India The electrocardiogram (ECG) is one of the popular and
2
Department of Computer Science, BCIIT, GGSIPU, Kalkaji, reliable medical tests that is accomplished by medical
Delhi, India experts to detect arrhythmia: irregularities in heartbeats,
3
Department of ECE, Karunya Institute of Technology and diagnose other cardiac-related diseases and monitor the
Sciences, Coimbatore, India

123
1636 Iranian Journal of Science and Technology, Transactions of Electrical Engineering (2023) 47:1635–1655
overall functionality of the heart. This test measures the
electrical activity of heartbeat (Karpagachelvi et al. 2010).
In this process, electrodes are placed on the human’s chest
and limbs that measure the rhythm of the heartbeats and
display it like waves on the monitor. The upper chambers
of the heart form the wave known as ‘P-wave’ that follows
the flat line when electrical impulses move to the bottom
chambers, the ventricles form the QRS complex wave, and
then, final T-wave is formed that depicts the electrical
recovery or return to the resting state of the ventricles.
However, the analysis of ECG signal is itself a complex
task due to variation in beats; small amplitude; difficulty in
accurately recognizing ECG components. Thus, doctors
may prescribe additional tests such as chest X-ray, elec-
trophysiologic testing, Holter monitor, and a variety of
other invasive and noninvasive tests (Hagiwara et al. 2018)
based on an ECG test to continuously monitor the heart for
few days to diagnose arrhythmia. Further, the study of
ECG reports requires human experts that can lead to
manual errors. The multiple opinions of doctors can also
even lead to misdiagnosis of arrhythmia detection. To
overcome these issues, an intelligent system is required that
can automate the task of arrhythmia detection, reduces the
probability of errors, and makes the system more reliable
due to automation. Thus, in this research study, an intel-
ligent system is developed using deep-learning-based
models that is one-dimensional Convolutional Neural
Network (1D-CNN) (Cui et al. 2021), two-dimensional
Convolution Neural Network (2D-CNN), CNN with long
short-term memory network (LSTM), and an ensemble
model to automate the task of arrhythmia detection and
classification that significantly reduces the time, efforts and
increases the accuracy of the task to a large extent.
The early detection of arrhythmia and save more human
lives is a challenging task, and hence, it is still an active
area of research for further improvements in the existing
approaches. Though various solutions exist in the literature
for arrhythmia detection, earlier studies intensively worked
1. Developed an intelligent system that can detect
on filtering noise from ECG signals (Agante and Sá 1999;
Poungponsri and Yu 2013; Sameni et al. 2005). Thereafter,
2. Utilized deep learning models for arrhythmia detection
various models are proposed (Hu et al. 1997; Sayadi and
Shamsollahi 2009) based on signal segmentation, manual
feature extraction (Vijaya et al. 2011; Ye et al. 2012),
3. Performed comparative study to assess the perfor-
Support Vector Machines (SVM), and their variants like
Relevance Vector Machines (RVM) (Gayathri et al. 2012;
4. Provides deep insight into this domain and eases the
Osowski et al. 2004). Further, researchers performed fea-
ture engineering to extract more features of ECG signal
such as area and amplitude of the waves. The researchers
proposed various machine learning-based methods and
utilized higher-order statistics and Hermite functions to
extract more features (Chazal et al. 2004; Osowski et al.
2004). Though traditional methods have their limitations
123
like manual pre-processing of signals is required, these
techniques are expensive and time-consuming.
In recent years, to overcome the above-mentioned
problems, researchers applied deep learning models like
Convolutional Neural Network (CNN), Recurrent Neural
Network (RNN) to study the ECG signal but still, the work
accomplished using these models rely on pre-processing of
the signals and this might lead to loss of information
(Acharya et al. 2017; Hannun et al. 2019) from the ECG
signal. The authors have applied one-dimensional convo-
lutional neural networks to classify the signals into
appropriate normal or arrhythmic classes, and then, the
authors combined two 1D-CNN to automatically detect the
QRS waves from the ECG signals (Xu and Liu 2020; Zhai
and Tin 2018). Thereafter, to avoid the loss of information
from the signals, two-dimensional CNN has been applied
by various authors for arrhythmia detection and classifi-
cation (Jun et al. 2018; Salem et al. 2018). Further,
recurrent neural network variants are used for the analysis
of time-series ECG signals as these networks can retain the
past as well as current information. The authors combined
convolutional neural networks and long short-term memory
networks (LSTM) to early diagnose arrhythmia (Gao et al.
2019; Picon et al. 2019; Yildirim 2018). It has been
observed that the evolution of deep learning into this
domain has made a significant contribution to arrhythmia
classification.
Inspired by these ideas, this research study conducts a
thorough comparison of the multiple deep learning-based
models that are then integrated using ensemble learning to
build a strong classifier. The models can detect and classify
arrhythmia that makes it more efficient over baseline
methods. To the best of our knowledge, this study is a
novel effort to provide a detailed comparative study of
different deep-learning-based classifiers.
The key contributions of this research study are as
follows:
arrhythmia in the early stages.
and classification problem to further optimize the
performance of existing methods.
mance of different classifiers.
task of medical professionals to study the ECG signals
with more accuracy.
Under the Association for the Advancement of Medical
Instrumentation (AAMI), the following five categories of
arrhythmia signals: Normal Beats (N), Supraventricular
Ectopic Beat (S), Ventricular ectopic beats (V), Fusion
beats (F), Unknown beats (Q), are not life-threatening
Iranian Journal of Science and Technology, Transactions of Electrical Engineering (2023) 47:1635–1655
(Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumen-
tation 1998); thus, in this study, various deep-learning-
based classifiers are developed to categorize these types of
heartbeats. The main objective of this study is to help
medical professionals in the early diagnosis of arrhythmia
and classification too. It automates the task of detection
with more accuracy. The proposed research study does not
depend on signal pre-processing and feature reduction
techniques to extract the relevant information from the
ECG signals; thus, it is computationally less intensive. This
study would serve as a support for medical professionals as
this study automates the task of arrhythmia detection and
classification and reduces the efforts as well as the pre-
processing time of the signals. This initiative aims to
combat heart arrhythmia-related problems and save more
human lives. The novelty of the paper is to enrich the
medical experts’ experience and classify as well as to
detect arrhythmia patients simultaneously.
The remaining paper is organized as follows: Sect. 2
details the related work in this domain that covers literature
related to pre-processing and learning models; Sect. 3
presents the comprehensive overview of the five deep
learning models and their architectures used in the study
for heart arrhythmia detection. The performance evaluation
and corresponding outcome of all the models are discussed
in Sect. 4 in detail. The discussion relevant to recent work
in particular is detailed in Sect. 5, and finally, concluding
remark and future scope is outlined in Sect. 6.
2 Related Work
2.1 Literature Studied Relevant to ECG Signal
Pre-processing
A study on data pre-processing techniques used in state-of-
the-art models is detailed in this section for readers’
viewpoint. ECG signals provide the most accurate real-
time electrical activity to give information about the
structure and functionality of the heart. During transmis-
sion and acquisition of ECG signals using ECG monitoring
system, different noises could be introduced. The noises
are mainly of two kinds—high-frequency noise and low-
frequency noise. The high-frequency noise consists of
power line noise, white Gaussian noise, motion noise
(electromyogram), and low-frequency noise consists of
baseline drifts, and electrode contact loss. The traditional
denoising approaches are either for the high frequency or
low frequency. Nowadays, despite separate denoising
techniques, the filters are used to remove undesired signal
components as both high frequency and low frequency
displays overlapping spectrum. The IIR Notch and FIR
filters both were traditionally used to eliminate both high-
1637
and low-frequency noises while cleaning the ECG signal
data. Though many of these methods have achieved high
accuracy but are dependent on manual extraction of fea-
tures that increases the computational complexity of the
methods.
The researchers have also proposed various novel
methods for noise reduction from ECG signals based on
adaptive filters (Poungponsri and Yu 2013, Rakshit and das
2018, and Ziarani and Konrad 2002), wavelet transforms
(Agante and De Sá 1999, Vijaya et al. 2011, and Li et al.
2017), nonlinear Bayesian filters (Sayadi and Shamsollahi
2009), Kalman filters (Yildirim 2018). For instance, Rak-
shit et al. proposed a better denoising method based on
empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and an adaptive
switching mean filter (ASMF). According to the results of
the study, the proposed method may be utilized to effec-
tively reduce the noise in ECG signals (Rakshit and Das
2018). But, before trying any complex filtering algorithm
in pre-processing phase, it is important to understand what
features need to be recognized. ECG signal for arrhythmia
signal is clearly a time-series problem, and a clear ECG
signal is depicted in Fig. 1. The main problem of ECG
signal is that the quality of signal might change with time,
i.e., (1) Reflects high quality during low activity in which
P, QRS, and T ware are detectable such as Heart Attack (2)
poor quality during intense moving such as cardiac exer-
cise only some abnormalities in QRS is noticeable. To
overcome this problem, researchers applied the Min–Max
principle of game theory (Dai et al. 2021). Another well-
known and powerful signal detection process is the adap-
tive filter that changes impulse response to the changing
environment. The Independent component analysis
(Ramkumar et al. 2021) and Blind Source Separation
(Sadiq et al. 2021) are the most popular process for
Fig. 1 ECG of a heart, waves: P, QRS, and T, intervals: PR and QT
(Ashley and Niebauer 2004)
123
1638 Iranian Journal of Science and Technology, Transactions of Electrical Engineering (2023) 47:1635–1655
multichannel configuration, but these are not suitable for
real-time due to the usage of more computational
resources.
2.2 Literature Studied Relevant to Machine
Learning and Deep Learning Models
This section discusses the relevant work related to this
domain such as various approaches have been proposed for
detection and classification like Support Vector Machines
(SVM), Relevance Vector Machines (RVM), Genetic
Algorithms, Bayesian method (Khatibi and Rabinezhad-
sadatmahaleh 2020; Li et al. 2017; Nasiri et al. 2009). For
instance, the researchers in their work utilized three
Bayesian classifiers that are Naı̈ve Bayes, linear discrimi-
nant analysis (LDA), and quadratic discriminant analysis
(QDA) to classify the ECG beats into relevant classes.
According to the results, the QDA classifier is the best of
the three classifiers (Casas et al. 2018). Further, the authors
in their work (Osowski et al. 2004) developed an expert
system for heartbeat recognition using Support Vector
Machine (SVM) on MIT-BIH arrhythmia dataset that is
dependent on two pre-processing methods that involve
higher-order statistics and Hermite characterization of QRS
wave of ECG signal and a final classifier is generated by
combining using weighted voting principle. It is observed
that a combined classifier gives better results than indi-
vidual classifiers. The authors in their work (Tsipouras and
Fotiadis 2004) detect arrhythmia based on the time and
frequency features, and these features are used to train the
neural networks. The R-R interval duration signal is
extracted from the ECG recordings, and decision rules are
applied to combine the outputs of all neural networks and
achieved good results. In addition, the authors devised a
low-cost approach based on a linear regression algorithm to
identify various ECG signal peaks (Aspuru et al. 2019) and
validated the model’s durability by creating an ECG sensor
to register and transmit the data to a mobile device. In
2009, researchers proposed a method that combines SVM
and Genetic Algorithms and extracted 22 features from
time voltage of R, S, T, P, Q features of ECG signals and
obtain classification accuracy of 93.46% (Nasiri et al.
2009). The researchers in their work (Polat and Güneş
2007) uses least square support vector machine along with
principal component analysis and yield accuracy of about
96%.
Further, authors in their work (Gayathri et al. 2012)
applied the Relevance Vector Machine (RVM) model, a
variant of the Support Vector Machine (SVM) to accu-
rately classify the ECG beats on the MIT-BIH arrhythmia
database. The results signify that this model outperforms
the traditional classifiers. But authors ascertain to use of
some advanced techniques to train the RVM classifier to
123
enhance the classification accuracy and the proposed
approach is also highly dependent on pre-processing and
feature extraction techniques. In 2018, authors used
wrapper-based feature selection techniques to reduce the
dimensions and utilized SVM-based approaches that are
one-against-one, one-against-all, and error correction code
to detect the presence of an arrhythmia. The results validate
that the one-against-one method of the SVM approach
achieves the highest accuracy (Mustaqeem et al. 2018).
Similarly, in 2018, authors introduced Optimum-Path
Forest, an SVM-based classifier that was evaluated on
several distance metrics and compared to other classifiers
too (Albuquerque et al. 2018). Moreover, in addition to
arrhythmia detection and classification, researchers have
also worked in the direction of proposing novel feature
engineering methods. Khatibi et al. (2020) in their work
have used deep learning and KNN to extract the features,
and then, these features are classified with various classi-
fiers such as SVM with different kernels, decision trees,
and random forests. Furthermore, Yang et al. (2018) and
fellow authors suggested a unique classification strategy
with stacked sparse auto-encoders and a soft regression
model to extract the features automatically and improve the
model’s robustness. Their findings substantiate the models’
usefulness.
In the later years, machine learning and other deep
learning-based models have evolved into this domain that
automates the task of detection and classification, but these
models have their own limitations like dependency on
signal pre-processing techniques to process the ECG sig-
nal. Thus, these models are computationally expensive and
time-consuming as the process must be carried out manu-
ally with the help of experts. Javed et al. (2010) in their
work proposed an artificial neural network (ANN)-based
system that is Multi-Layer Perceptron with an error prop-
agation algorithm for arrhythmia classification and
achieves a classification accuracy of 86.67%. Another work
using an artificial neural network is explored by Mitra et al.
(2013) in which authors have used correlation-based fea-
ture selection with a linear feed-forward neural network
and have achieved an accuracy of 87.71%. Further, in
2013, researchers proposed a probabilistic neural network
classifier that initially applied a feature reduction method
combining principal component analysis (PCA) with linear
discriminant analysis (LDA) and achieved satisfactory
accuracy. In 2017, the authors proposed a novel genetic
algorithm-based back propagation neural network and used
the wavelet packet decomposition method to extract the
relevant features. The findings show that the proposed
method has a high level of classification accuracy (Li et al.
2017). Later in 2018, authors utilized multilayer perceptron
(MLP) and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based
algorithms and were able to diagnose the diseases in all
Iranian Journal of Science and Technology, Transactions of Electrical Engineering (2023) 47:1635–1655
states with high accuracy (Savalia and Emamian 2018).
Recently, in 2019, researchers proposed architecture based
on a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) that is not
dependent on pre-processing techniques like feature
extraction and feature reduction and still achieves
promising results (Sellami and Hwang 2019). Similarly, the
authors (Rajkumar et al. 2019) applied a convolutional
neural network to categorize the heartbeats into appropriate
classes and achieve an accuracy of about 93%. In 2020,
researchers in their work adopted coupled convolutional
neural network (CNN)-based architecture with a dropout
mechanism and initially used wavelet filters to reduce the
noise from ECG signal (Xu and Liu 2020). The results
indicate that the proposed model achieves high classifica-
tion accuracy.
In 2015, the authors (Kiranyaz et al. 2015) proposed an
ECG classification system based on a 1D convolutional
network on real patient data. The authors in their work
(Ruiz et al. 2018) used 2D-CNN to extract the features,
effective learning is done using standard CNN-AlexNet,
and an accuracy of 90% is obtained. Further, the authors
proposed a transformed 2D-CNN classifier, in which each
ECG beat was converted into a two-dimensional grayscale
image, and the findings confirmed the excellent classifi-
cation accuracy (Jun et al. 2018). In 2018, authors (Zhai
and Tin 2018) proposed an ECG classification system
based on a convolutional neural network that transforms
the beats into a dual beat coupling matrix that captures beat
morphology and beat-to-beat correlation, and the results
validate improvements over traditional methods. The
authors proposed a novel approach multi-canonical corre-
lation analysis (MCAA) based on very deep convolutional
neural networks (VDCNN) in the same year, employing
filters to minimize the noise, and results revealed the
enhanced performance over existing methods (Amrani
et al. 2018). Further, more variants of convolutional neural
networks (Acharya et al. 2017; Li et al. 2018) have been
applied to optimize the performance of the classifiers.
In 2018, Yilidirim et al. (2018) proposed a bidirectional
LSTM network to classify ECG signals. In 2019, authors
(Yildirim et al. 2019) proposed a coded feature-based deep
LSTM network model to reduce the data size and identify
arrhythmia signals. In 2019, Gao et al. (2019) proposed a
long short-term network recurrent neural network model
with focal loss to detect arrhythmia and also to resolve the
imbalance problem of the dataset. Furthermore, in the same
year, Wang et al. (2019) proposed a bidirectional LSTM
with semantic encoding which eliminated the feature
extraction step and obtained good classification accuracy.
Picon et al. (2019) proposed a deep learning model based
1639
on a 1D-convolutional network and long short-term
memory network for the detection of ventricular fibrillation
and achieved promising results. Hou et al. (2019) proposed
a novel method that combines LSTM and SVM for
arrhythmia classification. A novel three-layer-based deep
genetic ensemble of classifiers (DGEC) is introduced that
integrates ensemble learning, deep learning, and evolu-
tionary computation, and the experiments show that the
suggested methodology obtains promising results (Pławiak
and Acharya 2020). Further, in 2021, the authors utilized
the transfer learning mechanism (Weimann and Conrad
2021) as it is expensive to acquire many annotated sam-
ples. The network is initially tuned on a small set of data to
classify Atrial Fibrillation, the most frequent type of heart
arrhythmia. As a result, the initial pre-training increases the
CNN’s performance. The related state-of-the-art along with
their features, advantages, and future scope is summarized
in Table 1.
The proposed study utilizes different deep learning
models to overcome the challenges faced in different
approaches as discussed above and summarized in Table 1.
For instance, in our work, the use of two-dimensional
convolutional neural network (2D-CNN) has eliminated the
work of feature extraction, as in this, one-dimensional
signals are converted into two-dimensional images; the
major advantage of performing this conversion is that no
mechanism for filtering of noise or feature extraction has to
be applied separately as convolution and max-pooling
layers automatically filter the noise before the acquisition
of features. Furthermore, the utilization of Long- Short-
Term Memory Network (LSTM) model is more beneficial
as it has the ability to apprehend different time scales that
enable to capture the subtle differences in ECG signals for
arrhythmia classification over convolutional neural net-
work (CNN).
This study is an effort to integrate both ideas detection
and classification using deep learning-based models with
minimal dependency on pre-processing of ECG signals. To
the best of our knowledge, there is no detailed work in the
direction of a comparative study of different classifiers. As
a result of the comparison study and implementation of an
ensemble learning model over a single model increases the
robustness and reliability of the models. The accomplished
comparative study would make the medical experts’ jobs
simpler because it will provide them with a better under-
standing of how to utilize deep-learning models in the right
direction. The novelty of the paper is to enrich the medical
experts’ experience and classify as well as to detect
arrhythmia patients simultaneously.
123
1640 Iranian Journal of Science and Technology, Transactions of Electrical Engineering (2023) 47:1635–1655

Table 1 Summary of approaches

Research Features/classifier Advantages Future scope
paper

Rakshit et al. Noise filtering Effective tool for noise filtering Beneficial for automated
(2018) empirical mode decomposition Preservation of QRS complex waves diagnostic systems
Adaptive switching mean filter
Aspuru et al. Signal segmentation Low cost Can be used as cost effective
(2019) Linear regression Correctly detect points strategy
Yang et al. Feature selection Heartbeat information is not lost Beneficial for ECG automatic
(2018) Autoencoders Eliminates manual feature extraction analysis
Softmax regression
Casas et al. Bayesian classification models Automated detection More features can be included
(2018) Naı̈ve Bayes model Assign probability to provide more insight
into the nature of heartbeats
Li et al. (2017) Back-propagation neural network High classification accuracy Can be used for automatic
Feature extraction using wavelet packet Reduce dimensions of features identification of arrhythmia
decomposition Optimize weights of neural network
Genetic algorithm to optimize weights of
back-propagation neural network
Mustaqeem SVM based approach High multiclass classification accuracy Can work on other datasets too
et al. (2018) Wrapper based feature selection method Most relevant features are extracted
Error correction code
Savalia et al. Multi-Layer Perceptron Neural Network High accuracy Can be refined further
(2018) Convolutional neural network No need for feature extraction
Jun et al. Two-dimension convolutional neural network Transformation of ECG signals into images Can be integrated with a
(2018) (2D-CNN) High accuracy medical robot’s camera
Yildirim et al. Long short-term memory High Performance More categories can be
(2019) Convolutional Auto-Encoder Low computational cost included
Reduced size of signals Analysis for long-duration data
Wang et al. Bi-directional LSTM Eliminates extraction of features Can be applied in real practical
(2019) Stacked de-noising auto-encoders High computational efficiency applications

The subsequent sections elaborate the architecture and

the detailed working of different classifiers used for
arrhythmia detection and classification.

3 Models Design and Architecture

This section discusses the framework of the proposed study

in detail that describes the entire workflow of the research
work. The real-world MIT-BIH arrhythmia dataset is used
for the experimental study of arrhythmia detection. The
workflow is depicted in Fig. 2 in which ECG signals are
given as an input to the different models that are imple-
mented in the current research study. The models that are
implemented and practiced are Artificial Neural Networks Fig. 2 Workflow of the arrhythmia detection
(Jadhav et al. 2010; Mohapatra et al. 2019), One-Dimen-
sional Convolutional Neural Networks (1D-CNN), Two- Two-Dimensional Convolutional Neural Networks with
Dimensional Convolutional Neural Networks (2D-CNN), long short-term memory network (2D-CNN with LSTM),
ensemble model. The best models have been saved and

123
Iranian Journal of Science and Technology, Transactions of Electrical Engineering (2023) 47:1635–1655
elaborated in the below sections as evaluated on the vali-
dation set during the optimization process. The entire
workflow of the work is depicted in Fig. 2 and detailed in
the following sub-sections:
3.1 Data Collection
The ECG Heartbeat Categorization dataset (Moody and
Mark 2001) that is a segmented and pre-processed version
of the MIT-BIT dataset is used for this research study. The
details of the dataset are given in Sect. 4.1. The next step is
to train the model using different classifiers.
3.2 Artificial Neural Networks: Training
the Model
Firstly, the model is trained using artificial neural net-
works. The model is configured with an input layer, a
single hidden layer, and an output layer. The architecture of
artificial neural networks is shown in Fig. 3 below.
The input layer consists of 187 neurons, due to 187
numbers of features in each heartbeat record of the training
data. There is no computation at the input layer; hence, the
output of the input layer is passed as an input to the hidden
layer as given in Eq. (1) where OI is the output of the input
layer and II is the input to the input layer.
O I ¼ II
Each neuron is fully connected to every other neuron in
the hidden layer following the input layer. The hidden layer
consists of 64 neurons following the input layer, the
Fig. 3 Architecture of artificial
neural network with output
classes as N: Normal beat, S:
Supraventricular premature
beat, V: Premature ventricular
contraction, F: Fusion of
ventricular and normal beat, Q:
Unclassifiable beat
1641
numbers of neurons in the hidden layer have been varied,
and this number of neurons achieves the best classification
results as validated on testing and validation data. Each
neuron is fully connected to the input and output layers by
connection weights denoted by wij and wjk as shown in
Fig. 3. The random values are initialized to the weights
initially, and then, weights are adjusted to minimize the
error. The hidden layer neuron is represented as given in
Eq. (2) where hðiÞ denotes a unit in the hidden layer, wi
denotes the weights, bðiÞ denotes the bias term and f
denotes the activation function.
T
ðiÞ
h ¼ f ðwðiÞ hði1Þ þ bðiÞ Þ ð2Þ
The ReLU activation function (Karlik and Olgac 2011)
is used for both input and hidden layers as it does not
activate all the neurons simultaneously and is given as in
Eq. (3).
fx; if x [ ¼ 0
f ðxÞ ¼ ð3Þ
f0; if x\0
The weighted sum of the inputs along with the bias
weight is given as an input to the hidden layer as given in
Eq. (4) where OIi is the output from the ith unit of the input
layer, bH is the bias input added to the hidden layer, h is the
units in the hidden layer, f is the features in the input layer.
Then, this is passed to the activation function as given in
ð1Þ Eq. (3) that gives the output of the hidden layer as
OH ¼ f ðIH Þ.
123
1642 Iranian Journal of Science and Technology, Transactions of Electrical Engineering (2023) 47:1635–1655
f X
X h
IH ¼ ðwij  OIi Þ þ bH ð4Þ
i¼1 j¼1
The output layer consists of 5 nodes, each representing
the value for each output class that is five different heart-
beats classes. Thus, soft-max activation function (Agosti-
nelli et al. 2014) is used in this layer as given in Eq. (6) due
to multi-class classification problem, where IO is input to
the output layer as given in Eq. (5) where c is the number
of classes of the heartbeat signal,h is the units in the hidden
layer and the output is computed as OO ¼ /ðIO Þ.
h X
X c
IO ¼ ðwjk  OHj Þ þ bO ð5Þ
j¼1 k¼1
eIOj
/ðIO Þ ¼ P ð6Þ
eIOk
k
The back-propagation training algorithm is used to train
the network, in its forward pass, the input is passed through
the activation function to reach the output layer and in its
backward pass, the actual output is compared with the
desired output. This difference between the actual and
desired outputs is known as error, thus to minimize the
error, a gradient descent optimization algorithm is used by
computing the partial error derivatives, dE as given in
Eq. (7) where l is the learning rate (Hertz 2018).
Dwij ¼ l½dE=dwij  ð7Þ
The classifier performance is evaluated and compared
with other classifiers by calculation of the confusion
matrix: TP (True Positives), FP (False Positives), TN (True
Negatives), FN (False Negatives). The overall results of
accuracy are discussed in Sect. 4.
3.3 One-Dimensional Convolutional Neural
Networks (1D-CNN): Training the Model
The next classifier that is used to train the model is 1D-
CNN. It consists of an input layer comprising ECG signals
as an input, multiple convolution layers, multiple max-
pooling layers, fully connected layers, and a single output
layer that classifies the heartbeat signals in the correct
category. The convolution of the input with the kernel
involves the element-wise matrix multiplication problem of
each input unit resulting in a single value as given in
Eq. (8) where Rk is the range of the convolution kernel, olk
denotes the output in layer l received after passing the
weighted sum of inputs along with bias weight through
Relu activation function /, wik is the weight between the
layers, bk is the bias weight (Isin and Ozdalili 2017). The
size of the kernel is small as compared to the input; thus,
123
calculations and the number of parameters sharing are
reduced. The batch normalization and dropout operations
are applied to improve the model performance.
X
olk ¼ /ð ieR ol1
i  wik þ bk Þ ð8Þ
k
The detailed architecture is shown in Fig. 4 and dis-
cussed in the following subsections.
The input layer has 187 neurons, due to 187 numbers of
features in each heartbeat record of the training data. The
input layer is connected further to the convolutional layer.
The classifier contains three convolutional layers that are
responsible for feature extraction from the dataset using
multi-dimensional array-based filters known as kernels.
The 64 kernels are present in all the convolutional layers.
The size of kernels in each layer is 6, 3, and 3, respectively.
Each convolutional layer is followed by a max-pooling
layer to reduce the dimensionality. The classifier contains 3
max-pooling layers, and each max-pooling layer proceeds
with one convolutional layer. The max-pooling layers have
kernel sizes of 3, 2, and 2, respectively. The ReLU acti-
vation function is used in each layer except the output layer
as given above in Eq. (3). The batch normalization process
is applied after each convolutional layer to improve the
performance and stability of the classifier. The mean and
variance of the input layers are computed as given in
Eq. (9) and Eq. (10) where m is the number of records in
each batch; j is the number of batches; l is the mean and d
is the variance of a batch (Ioffe and Szegedy 2015).
1X m
l¼ xi ð9Þ
m i¼1
1X m
d2 ¼ ðxi lÞ2 ð10Þ
m i¼1
Then, the input layers are normalized using the above
calculated mean and variance of batches as given in
Eq. (11) where xi is the normalized input and e is a
constant.
xi l
xi ¼ pffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffiffi ð11Þ
d2 þe
Further, the normalized input is scaled to obtain the
output of layer, yi as given in Eq. (12) where c and b are
learned during the training of the network.
yi ¼ cxi þ b ð12Þ
The two fully connected dense layers are added after the
last max-pooling layer consisting of 64 and 32 nodes,
respectively. The output layer has 5 nodes, each repre-
senting the value for each output class. The soft-max
activation function is used in this layer as given above in
Eq. (6) due to a multi-class classification problem, where
Iranian Journal of Science and Technology, Transactions of Electrical Engineering (2023) 47:1635–1655
Fig. 4 One-dimensional convolutional neural network architecture (Conv: convolution; BN: batch normalization; AF: activation function; Relu:
rectified linear unit activation function
IO is input to the output layer. It is fully connected with the
last dense layer.
3.4 Two-Dimensional Convolutional Neural
Networks (2D-CNN): Training the Model
The next classifier that is used to train the model is 2D-
CNN. In this, one-dimensional signals are converted into
two-dimensional images; the major advantage of per-
forming this conversion is that no mechanism for filtering
of noise or feature extraction has to be applied separately as
convolution and max-pooling layers automatically filter the
noise before the acquisition of features. Moreover, it
resembles the diagnosis done by doctors through moni-
toring the ECG images (Jun et al. 2018). The detailed
architecture is shown in Fig. 5 and detailed in the following
subsections.
The input layer has 187*2 neurons, due to 187 numbers
of features in each heartbeat record of the training data.
The input layer is connected further to the convolutional
layer, and the classifier contains 5 convolutional layers.
The convolutional layer is responsible for feature extrac-
tion from the dataset using multi-dimensional array-based
filters also known as kernels. The five layers have 256, 512,
512, 128, and 64 kernels, respectively, in the convolutional
layers. The size of kernels in the first layer is (10, 2), and
the rest layers have kernels of size (5, 1), respectively.
Each convolutional layer is followed by a max-pooling
layer. The ReLU activation function is used in each layer
1643
except the output layer as given above in Eq. (3). The batch
normalization process is applied after each convolutional
layer to improve the performance and stability of the
classifier. The dropout mechanism is applied to all con-
volutional layers with a dropout rate of 0.5 except the last
one. It is applied to reduce the interdependent learning
between the neurons that helps in reducing the overfitting
of the model, and hence, the training time is reduced for
each epoch. The GlobalAveragePooling2d layer is used
just before the dense output layer to reduce the dimensions
of the input to the last layer. The output layer has 5 nodes,
each representing the value for each output class. The soft-
max activation function is used in this layer as given above
in Eq. (6) due to a multi-class classification problem where
IO is input to the output layer. It is fully connected with the
last dense layer.
3.5 Two-Dimensional Convolutional Neural
Networks (2D-CNN) with Long Short-Term
Memory (LSTM): Training the Model
The next classifier that is used to train the model is 2D-
CNN with Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM). The con-
volutional neural networks have the capability to process
spatial or local data only; thus, a variant of the recurrent
neural network, Long Short-Term Memory Network
(LSTM) is integrated with 2D-CNN as it has the capability
to learn the long-term dependencies of ECG signals (Picon
et al. 2019). The LSTM has the ability to apprehend
123
1644 Iranian Journal of Science and Technology, Transactions of Electrical Engineering (2023) 47:1635–1655

Fig. 5 Two-dimensional convolutional neural network architecture (Conv: Convolution; BN: batch normalization; AF: activation function; Relu:
rectified linear unit activation function)

Fig. 6 Two-dimensional convolutional neural network with LSTM architecture. (Conv: convolution; BN: batch normalization; AF: activation
function; Relu: rectified linear unit activation function

123
Iranian Journal of Science and Technology, Transactions of Electrical Engineering (2023) 47:1635–1655
different time scales that enable to capture the subtle dif-
ferences in ECG signals for arrhythmia classification. The
detailed architecture is shown in Fig. 6 and discussed
below:
The input layer has 187*2 neurons, due to 187 numbers
of features in each heartbeat record of the training data.
The input to the model is given as two-dimensional images
that are formed from given one-dimensional ECG signals.
The input layer is connected further to the convolutional
layer. The classifier contains 3 convolutional layers that are
responsible for feature extraction from the dataset using
multi-dimensional array-based filters also known as ker-
nels. The three layers have 256, 512, and 512 kernels,
respectively, in the convolutional layers. The size of ker-
nels in the first layer is (10, 2), and the rest layers have
kernels of size (5, 1), respectively. The ReLU activation
function is used in each layer except the output layer as
given above in Eq. (3). With the deepening of the layers,
the inputs to the layer might change after the updating of
weights during the back-propagation process that causes
the learning algorithms to pursue a moving target. This
variation in the distribution of inputs is known as internal
covariate shift (Ioffe and Szegedy 2015). Thus, the batch
normalization process is applied after each convolutional
layer that systematizes the inputs for the mini-batch of each
layer. The batch normalization process is applied to
improve the performance and stability of the classifier.
Further, the dropout mechanism is applied to all convolu-
tional layers with a dropout rate of 0.5 except for the last
one. It is applied to reduce the interdependent learning
between the neurons that helps in reducing the overfitting
of the model, and hence, the training time for each epoch is
reduced. The LSTM layer is added before the dense output
layer that is responsible to capture the data at different time
scales. It consists of 64 cells that help in learning order
dependency between the successive signals of a heartbeat.
The LSTM architecture works by taking the sequence of
ECG signals as input and passing it through the sigmoid
activation function that takes into consideration the previ-
ous ot1 as well as the current information it as given in
Eq. (13) to predict the future state of the signals and out-
puts in the category of normal or arrhythmic class category
corresponding to the state of the heartbeat signal.
/ðtÞ ¼ dðWf :½ot1 ; it  þ bi
The further information to be stored depends on which
part of the information is to be updated; thus, sigmoid
activation function is used in the current study suggesting
the correct type of class category to early diagnose the
arrhythmia, and then, the hyperbolic tangent activation
function is used with updated values that can be added to
the current state as given in Eq. (14) and Eq. (15),
respectively (Agostinelli et al. 2014).
1645
xt ¼ dðWi :½ot1 ; it  þ bi ð14Þ
St ¼ tanhðWC :½ot1 ; it  þ bC ð15Þ
The final cell state value is calculated by multiplying the
old state with /ðtÞ and then, adding the updated values as
given in Eq. (16) below.
Ct ¼ /ðtÞ  Ct1 þ xt  St ð16Þ
The final output is based on the final state value, thus
initially; the sigmoid activation function is applied to
acquire the required output as given in Eq. (17).
ot ¼ dðWO :½ot1 ; it  þ bO ð17Þ
This is then passed through the hyperbolic tangent
activation function to let the value lie between -1 and 1 as
given in Eq. (18).
ht ¼ ot  tanhðCt Þ ð18Þ
The dense output layer is used as prediction is to be
done across five classes of category with soft-max activa-
tion function as given above in Eq. (6). The output of the
entire network is computed as OO ¼ /ðIO Þ where OO is the
output of the output layer and /ðIO Þ is given as in Eq. (19).
eIOj
/ðIO Þ ¼ P ð19Þ
eIOk
k
The learning rate is set to 0.001, and the model is trained
for 59 epochs as these parameter values give better vali-
dation accuracy as discussed in the results section. The
cross-entropy error is calculated as soft-max activation
function is used in the output layer and is given in Eq. (20)
where t is the number of target classes that is five different
categories corresponding to heartbeats, p is the predicted
probability in a specific class t, y is an indicator that
indicates if the record is classified successfully in the target
class (Zhang and Sabuncu 2018).
Xm
Cross Entropy Loss; E ¼  yo;t logðpo;t Þ ð20Þ
t¼1
3.6 Ensemble Learning Algorithm: Training
the Model
ð13Þ The bagging algorithm is used to combine the two-di-
mensional CNN and two-dimensional CNN with LSTM.
The architecture is shown in Fig. 7. The 2D-CNN and 2D-
CNN with LSTM are selected as base models due to their
comparatively less performance. The idea is to combine
them in order to create a strong ensemble model that
achieves better performance. The results of individual
classifiers and ensemble models are discussed in Sect. 4,
123
1646 Iranian Journal of Science and Technology, Transactions of Electrical Engineering (2023) 47:1635–1655

Fig. 7 Ensemble Model

…….

…. ….
Original
Ensemble
Dataset Bootstrap Weak Model
Samples Learners

and comparison of different classifiers is discussed in detail 2018) is applied to convert the class into a binary vector of
in Sect. 4.2.6, respectively. length five due to the presence of five classes in the dataset.
It runs on multiple subsets of data from the original data Each column of the vector represents one output class, one
to achieve better accuracy and stability of the model. It of the columns in the vector is 1 and the rest are 0, the
averages the predicted probabilities values of the classifiers column with 1 represents the output class for that particular
as given in Eq. (21) where S is the sub-samples of the heartbeat signal. The signal plots for different types of
original data, wi denote the weak learners (Bauer and heartbeats are shown in Fig. 8a–e:
Kohavi 1999). The ensemble model helps in the reduction
in the variance of the prediction. 4.2 Performance Evaluation of Different
X
S Classifiers
1
EL ¼ probðwi ð:ÞÞ ð21Þ
S i¼1 This section describes the performance of the different
classifiers on the same sampled training and testing dataset.
The models are trained using the tensor flow framework in
python as this framework has the capability to hold inputs,
4 Experimental Results and Discussion
labels, features, activation functions, placeholders, weights,
biases, input layer neurons, hidden layer neurons, output.
4.1 Experimental Dataset
There is a specific tensor to hold the model’s output, and
then, it is compared with the actual output. Once the error
The real-world MIT-BIH arrhythmia dataset (Moody and
is reduced to a minimum value, the model is tested for
Mark 2001) is used for this research study that consists of
accuracy against the test data.
multiple ECG signals. It is one of the most significant ECG
databases. This database consists of 48 annotated records
4.2.1 Artificial Neural Networks
procured from 47 subjects studied by Arrhythmia Labora-
tory of Beth Israel Hospital in Boston between 1975 and
The Artificial Neural Network (ANN) classifier is trained
1979. The 60% of the records were gathered from inpa-
for 50 epochs, and an accuracy of 96.85% is achieved on
tients. In total, there are 109,446 heartbeat signals that are
the test data. The model accuracy and loss curves for the
split into training, validation, and test data in the ratio of
training and validation dataset are shown in Fig. 9a and b,
60%, 20%, and 20%. These signals are the recordings of 25
respectively. It is observed from curves that network con-
men in between the age of 32 to 89 years and 22 women in
verges and accuracy has increased in firm state and is
between the age of 23 to 89 years for the duration of
stabilized at 50 epochs.
30 min at 360 samples per second. The ECG signal data
The performance of the model is visualized using a
have a sampling frequency of 125 Hz and contain 188
confusion matrix as shown in Table 2 where each element
columns of which the last column represents the class of
in the matrix denotes the number of predictions estimated
the heartbeat signal. The data are pre-processed using
by the model for different heartbeat classes. The tenfold
oversampling technique (Barua et al. 2012) to balance the
cross-validation is used to assess the performance of the
dataset and to accurately categorize the data in the correct
classifier. The average classifications results for the test
class. As the current problem is a multi-class classification
data are shown in Table 2. The confusion matrix has eased
problem indicated through the output column of the dataset
the task of computing the evaluation metrics as the output
that represents five classes of the heartbeat signal: Normal
classes are not binary in nature. It is observed from the
Beat (N), Supraventricular ectopic beats (S), Ventricular
confusion matrix that the model is able to make accurate
ectopic beats (V), Fusion beats (F), and Unknown beats
predictions and discriminate among different classes.
(Q). Thus, initially, the hot-encoding algorithm (Li et al.

123
Iranian Journal of Science and Technology, Transactions of Electrical Engineering (2023) 47:1635–1655 1647

Fig. 8 a Signal plots for normal beat. b Signal plots for supraventricular ectopic beat. c Signal plots for ventricular ectopic beat. d Signal plots for
fusion beat. 8 e Signal plots for unknown beat

The evaluation metrics characterized in the confusion (FP) as given in Eq. (22). True positives (TP) indicate that
matrix (Sajjadi et al. 2018) is applied to showcase the data are classified into the correct category, and False
performance of models are as follows: Positive (FP) indicates that abnormal data are categorized
into the normal category.
4.2.1.1 Precision It is defined as the ratio of true positives TP
(TP) to the sum of true positives (TP) and false positives Precision ¼ ð22Þ
TP + FP

123
1648 Iranian Journal of Science and Technology, Transactions of Electrical Engineering (2023) 47:1635–1655

Fig. 9 a Model accuracy curve for ANN classifier. b loss curve for ANN classifier

Table 2 Test data confusion matrix for the ANN classifier 4.2.1.4 Accuracy It is defined as the fraction of the total
records that are correctly classified by the model as given
N 0.98 0.01 0.01 0.00 0.00
in Eq. (25). The higher value of accuracy indicates that
True Class S 0.19 0.77 0.03 0.01 0.01 data are classified appropriately.
V 0.03 0.00 0.95 0.02 0.00 TP + TN
F 0.07 0.01 0.08 0.83 0.00 Accuracy ¼ ð25Þ
TP + TN + FP + FN
Q 0.01 0.00 0.01 0.00 0.98
N S V F Q
4.2.1.5 F1-Score It is defined as the harmonic mean of
Predicted class
precision and recall as given in Eq. (26).
Precision  Recall
F1  Score ¼ 2  ð26Þ
Precision þ Recall
The confusion matrix shows that utilizing artificial
4.2.1.2 Recall or Sensitivity It is defined as the ratio of neural networks to train the model resulted in a precision of
true positives (TP) to the sum of true positives (TP) and 82%, recall or sensitivity of 90%, specificity of 97.5%, F1-
false negatives (FN) as given in Eq. (23) where true posi- score of 86%, and accuracy of 97%.
tives (TP) indicate that data are classified into the correct
category and false negatives (FN) indicate that normal data 4.2.2 One-Dimensional Convolutional Neural Networks
are categorized into the abnormal category. (1D-CNN)
TP
Recall ¼ ð23Þ The 1D-CNN classifier is trained just for 10 epochs and
TP + FN
within this number of epochs, an accuracy of 98.04% is
achieved on the test data. The model accuracy and loss
4.2.1.3 Specificity It is defined as the ratio of true nega- curves for the training and validation dataset are shown in
tives (TN) to the sum of true negatives (TN) and false Fig. 10a and b, respectively. It is observed that accuracy
positives (FP) as given in Eq. (24) where true negatives has increased in the firm state and is stabilized within 10
(TN) indicate that data are classified into the correct cat- epochs.
egory and false positives (FP) indicate that abnormal data The performance of the model is evaluated on test data
are categorized into the normal category. and is visualized using a confusion matrix as shown in
TN Table 3 where each element in the matrix denotes the
Specificity ¼ ð24Þ
TN þ FP number of predictions estimated by the model. The large
values of the correct responses shown in bold indicate the
high accuracy of the classifier. The evaluation measures

123
Iranian Journal of Science and Technology, Transactions of Electrical Engineering (2023) 47:1635–1655 1649

Fig. 10 a Model accuracy curve for 1D-CNN classifier. b Model loss curve for 1D-CNN classifier

Table 3 Test data confusion matrix for the 1D-CNN classifier defined above in Eqs. (22), (23), (24), (25) and (26),
respectively.
N 0.99 0.01 0.00 0.00 0.00
The confusion matrix shows that training the model with
True Class S 0.19 0.78 0.02 0.01 0.01 two-dimensional convolutional neural networks resulted in
V 0.04 0.00 0.94 0.01 0.00 a precision of 80%, recall of 94%, specificity of 98.5%, F1-
F 0.09 0.00 0.11 0.80 0.00 score of 95%, and accuracy of 96%.
Q 0.01 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.99
N S V F Q 4.2.4 Two-Dimensional Convolutional Neural Networks
Predicted class (2D-CNN) with LSTM

The 2D-CNN with LSTM classifier is trained for 59 epochs

used for the performance evaluation are defined above in
Eqs. (22), (23), (24), (25) and (26), respectively.
The confusion matrix shows that utilizing one-dimen-
sional convolutional neural networks to train the model
resulted in the precision of 90%, recall of 90%, specificity
of 97.4%, F1-score of 90%, and accuracy of 98%.
4.2.3 Two-Dimensional Convolutional Neural Networks
(2D-CNN)
The 2D-CNN classifier is trained just for 38 epochs before
the loss of the model is fixed, and an accuracy of 95.6% is
achieved on the test data. The model accuracy and loss
curves for the training and validation dataset are shown in
Fig. 11a and b. It is observed that accuracy has increased in
a firm state and stabilized within 38 epochs.
The performance of the model is evaluated on test data
and is visualized using a confusion matrix as shown in
Table 4 where each element in the matrix denotes the
number of predictions estimated by the model. The eval-
uation measures used for the performance evaluation are
before the loss of the model plateaued, and an accuracy of
94.9% is achieved on the test data. The model accuracy and
loss curves for the training and validation dataset are
shown in Fig. 12a and b. It is observed that accuracy has
increased in a firm state and stabilized within 59 epochs.
The performance of the model is evaluated on test data
and is visualized using a confusion matrix as shown in
Table 5 where each element in the matrix denotes the
number of predictions estimated by the model. The eval-
uation measures used for the performance evaluation are
defined above in Eqs. (22), (23), (24), (25) and (26),
respectively.
It is observed from the confusion matrix that training the
model using two-dimensional convolutional neural net-
works with LSTM has achieved a precision of 78%, a recall
of 93%, specificity of 98.4%, F1- score of 83%, and an
accuracy of 95%.
4.2.5 Ensemble Model
The 2D-CNN and 2D-CNN with LSTM classifier is com-
bined using a bagging algorithm. The accuracy of 96.2% is

123
1650 Iranian Journal of Science and Technology, Transactions of Electrical Engineering (2023) 47:1635–1655

Fig. 11 a Model accuracy curve for 2D-CNN classifier. b Loss curve for 2D-CNN classifier

Table 4 Test data confusion matrix for the 2D-CNN classifier measures used for the performance evaluation are defined
above in Eqs. (22), (23), (24), (25) and (26), respectively.
N 0.96 0.04 0.00 0.00 0.00
The confusion matrix shows that training the model with
True Class S 0.08 0.91 0.01 0.01 0.00 ensemble model resulted in a precision of 87.2%, recall of
V 0.02 0.01 0.95 0.02 0.00 96.9%, specificity of 98.6%, F1-score of 91.8%, and
F 0.03 0.02 0.05 0.90 0.00 accuracy of 96.2%. The TPR and FPR values are shown in
Q 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.99 Table 7.
N S V F Q
Predicted class 4.2.6 Comparison of Different Classifiers

The performance of the different classifiers is measured

achieved using ensemble learning as shown in Fig. 13. The
performance of the model is evaluated on test data and is
visualized using the confusion matrix as shown in Table 6
where each element in the matrix denotes the number of
predictions estimated by the model. The evaluation
using different metrics that are accuracy, precision, recall,
and F1-score as shown in Fig. 13. The ECG dataset is
randomly divided into 10 equal folds. The eightfolds are
used for the training set, and remaining two folds are used
for the test and validation set, respectively. The model
producing the best validation results are used further for

Fig. 12 a Model accuracy curve for 2D-CNN with LSTM. b Loss curve for 2D-CNN with LSTM

123
Iranian Journal of Science and Technology, Transactions of Electrical Engineering (2023) 47:1635–1655 1651

Table 5 Test data confusion matrix for the 2D-CNN with LSTM Table 6 Test data confusion matrix for the ensemble model
classifier
N 0.96 0.03 0.00 0.00 0.00
N 0.95 0.04 0.00 0.00 0.00
True Class S 0.08 0.91 0.01 0.00 0.00
True Class S 0.10 0.88 0.01 0.00 0.00 V 0.02 0.01 0.95 0.02 0.00
V 0.02 0.01 0.94 0.02 0.00 F 0.04 0.01 0.04 0.91 0.00
F 0.04 0.01 0.04 0.91 0.00 Q 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.99
Q 0.01 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.99 N S V F Q
N S V F Q Predicted class
Predicted class

Table 7 True positive rate and false positive rate of every classifier
for test data
evaluation of the test folds. The average classification
results for every classifier are depicted in Fig. 14 below. Classifier TPR FPR
Through experimentation, it has been observed that one- ANN 0.89 0.005
dimensional convolutional neural network achieves the 1D-CNN 0.75 0.002
highest accuracy of 98%, artificial networks have an 2D-CNN 0.88 0.01
accuracy of 97%, two-dimensional convolutional neural 2D-CNN with LSTM 0.84 0.01
networks and ensemble classifiers have comparable accu- Ensemble 0.87 0.007
racy of 96% and convolutional neural network with LSTM
has an accuracy of 95%. The utilization of deep learning
models has achieved promising results for arrhythmia TP
TPR ¼ ð27Þ
classification. This enables the medical experts to diagnose TP + FN
arrhythmia at early stages that can save more human lives. FP
FPR ¼ ð28Þ
Further, the performance of various classifiers for test FP þ TN
data is also assessed using the ROC curve that displays the
The ROC curve goes through the top-left corner for a
true positive rate (TPR) against the false positive rate
good classification method. It is evident from the above
(FPR) at different threshold values, as illustrated in Fig. 14.
Fig. 14 that area under the curve for 1D-CNN is higher
The true positive rate is defined as the proportion of the
than the other classifiers, then the ANN classifier is better
actual positives that are correctly determined as given in
in discrimination among the different output classes, the
Eq. (27), while the false positive rate is defined as the
2D-CNN and ensemble classifiers have comparable per-
proportion of the negatives that are incorrectly classified as
formance, and finally, 2D-CNN with LSTM classifier has
positive as given in Eq. (28).
similar performance.

Fig. 13 Accuracy, precision,

recall and F1-score of every
classifier

123
1652 Iranian Journal of Science and Technology, Transactions of Electrical Engineering (2023) 47:1635–1655
Fig. 14 ROC Curve of every
classifier for Test Data
5 Discussion
The current research study is inspired by previous studies
in this area. Several studies have been carried out to
automate the task of heart arrhythmia detection using deep
learning-based models (Acharya et al. 2017; Gao et al.
2019; Isin and Ozdalili 2017; Kiranyaz et al. 2015; Li et al.
2018). This study is a novel effort to provide a unified
comparison of several deep learning-based models such as
Artificial Neural Networks, 1D-CNN, 2D-CNN, 2D-CNN
with LSTM, and ensemble classifiers that would give a
deeper insight to the researchers working in this domain.
For instance, Xu et al. (2020) in their study used cou-
pled-convolution layer architecture and attained an overall
accuracy of 99.43% and the findings conclude that the
model performed better in the categorization of the ven-
tricular ectopic beat (VEB) and supraventricular ectopic
beat (SVEB). In addition, Hannun et al. (2019) in their
work used a deep neural network (DNN) to classify 12
classes and attained an area under the curve of 0.97 and an
F1- score of 0.837. The authors in their work (Zhai and Tin
2018) encoded the beats into a dual beat coupling matrix,
and this encoded 2D-CNN-based classifier outperformed
previous state-of-the-art approaches. Similarly, authors in
their work (Kiranyaz et al. 2015) used 1D-CNN on patient-
specific data and obtained better accuracy for ventricular
ectopic beat (VEB) and supraventricular ectopic beats
(SVEB) classification.
Jun et al. (2018) in their work developed a transformed
deep 2D-CNN, tested on the MIT-BIH arrhythmia data-
base, and achieved an accuracy of 99.05% with 97.85%
sensitivity. Moreover, to hold the temporal information the
123
authors in their work (Yildirim et al. 2019) implemented a
long short-term network (LSTM) with a convolutional
auto-encoder (CAE) that compresses the ECG signals on an
average of about 70% and achieved an accuracy of over
99%. Further, the authors in their work (Wang et al. 2019)
used a bi-directional LSTM classifier with stacked
denoising auto-encoders (SDAE) that learns the semantic
encoding of heartbeats and the findings show that the study
obtained high classification accuracy.
The most recent work published in this area is by Cui
et al. in September 2021 in which authors claimed that
extracted features using 1D CNN and wavelet transform
are optimal features that makes it better than the existing
models. In our work, we are able to achieve this same
accuracy of 1D CNN without wavelet transform. The
comparison in terms of correct class-wise accuracy is
comparable.
To the best of our knowledge, this is a detailed com-
parative study that comprehensively evaluates the perfor-
mance of different classifiers. The analysis of the results
indicates that the implementation of the deep learning-
based models including artificial neural networks, 1D-
CNN, 2D-CNN, 2D-CNN with LSTM, and ensemble
classifiers resulted in an accuracy of over 95% for each
classifier. Though the models have achieved good accuracy
but still further refinements might be required to test for
other real ECG datasets. The advanced network architec-
tures can be used to further enhance the classification
accuracy. The work can be extended to detect different
kinds of arrhythmia and other heart diseases with high
accuracy from ECG records. The findings show that deep
learning models have a significant impact on the
Iranian Journal of Science and Technology, Transactions of Electrical Engineering (2023) 47:1635–1655
automation of heart arrhythmia detection and classification.
This research could aid medical professionals in making an
accurate diagnosis of arrhythmia.
6 Conclusion and Future Work
Heart arrhythmia is defined as irregularities in the heart-
beats, but analysis of ECG signals and accurate recognition
of ECG components is itself a complex task. Therefore, an
automated system is required to accurately diagnose
arrhythmia. Thus, early heart arrhythmia detection and
classification is an active area of research. This study
automates the task of arrhythmia detection and classifica-
tion using deep learning models. The classification results
show that one-dimensional convolutional neural networks
achieve the highest accuracy of 98%, artificial neural net-
works reach an accuracy of 97%, two-dimensional con-
volutional neural networks achieve an accuracy of 96%,
two-dimensional convolutional neural networks with
LSTM reach an accuracy of 95%, and an ensemble model
that is a combination of two-dimensional CNN and two-
dimensional convolutional neural networks with LSTM
also has comparable accuracy of 96%. Thus, the applica-
bility of deep learning models in this direction has proved
to be promising.
In the future, the work can be extended in the following
research directions:
1. The current study can be extended to include more
categories of arrhythmia.
2. The proposed models can be integrated with an
android application to make them real-time and easily
available for commercial purposes.
3. It can be further tuned with medical cameras.
4. It can be evaluated on other real-world datasets as well
as data from hospitals.
This study provides a detailed comparative study for
arrhythmia detection and classification using various deep
learning models. The study would be beneficial for medical
experts to potentially diagnose arrhythmia earlier and save
more human lives due to heart disorders. It has been
observed that medical experts could use deep learning-
based models to diagnose additional heart-related disorders
too based on ECG readings.
Declarations
Conflict of Interest The authors have no conflicts of interest to declare
that are relevant to the content of this article.
1653
References
Acharya UR, Oh SL, Hagiwara Y, Tan JH, Adam M, Gertych A, San
Tan R (2017) A deep convolutional neural network model to
classify heartbeats. Comput Biol Med 89:389–396
Agante PM, De Sá JM (1999) ECG noise filtering using wavelets with
soft-thresholding methods. In: Computers in cardiology 1999.
Vol 26 (Cat. No. 99CH37004) pp 535–538. IEEE
Agostinelli F, Hoffman M, Sadowski P, Baldi P (2014) Learning
activation functions to improve deep neural networks. arXiv
preprint https://arxiv.org/abs/1412.6830
Amrani M, Hammad M, Jiang F, Wang K, Amrani A (2018) Very
deep feature extraction and fusion for arrhythmias detection.
Neural Comput Appl 30(7):2047–2057
Ashley EA, Niebauer J (2004) Cardiology explained
Aspuru J, Ochoa-Brust A, Félix RA, Mata-López W, Mena LJ, Ostos
R, Martı́nez-Peláez R (2019) Segmentation of the ECG Signal by
means of a linear regression algorithm. Sensors 19(4):775
Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (1998)
Testing and reporting performance results of cardiac rhythm and
ST segment measurement algorithms. ANSI/AAMI EC 38:1998
Barua S, Islam MM, Yao X, Murase K (2012) MWMOTE–majority
weighted minority oversampling technique for imbalanced data
set learning. IEEE Trans Knowl Data Eng 26(2):405–425
Bauer E, Kohavi R (1999) An empirical comparison of voting
classification algorithms: bagging, boosting, and variants. Mach
Learn 36(1–2):105–139
Casas MM, Avitia RL, Gonzalez-Navarro FF, Cardenas-Haro JA,
Reyna MA (2018) Bayesian classification models for premature
ventricular contraction detection on ECG traces. J Healthcare
Eng. https://doi.org/10.1155/2018/2694768
Cui J, Wang L, He X, De Albuquerque VHC, AlQahtani SA, Hassan
MM (2021) Deep learning-based multidimensional feature
fusion for classification of ECG arrhythmia. Neural Comput
Appl. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00521-021-06487-5
Dai H, Hwang HG, Tseng VS (2021) Convolutional neural network
based automatic screening tool for cardiovascular diseases using
different intervals of ECG signals. Comput Methods Progr
Biomed 203:106035
de Albuquerque VHC, Nunes TM, Pereira DR, Luz EJDS, Menotti D,
Papa JP, Tavares JMR (2018) Robust automated cardiac
arrhythmia detection in ECG beat signals. Neural Comput Appl
29(3):679–693
De Chazal P, O’Dwyer M, Reilly RB (2004) Automatic classification
of heartbeats using ECG morphology and heartbeat interval
features. IEEE Trans Biomed Eng 51(7):1196–1206
Gao J, Zhang H, Lu P, Wang Z (2019) An effective LSTM recurrent
network to detect arrhythmia on imbalanced ECG dataset.
J Healthcare Eng. https://doi.org/10.1155/2019/6320651
Gayathri S, Suchetha M, Latha V (2012) ECG arrhythmia detection
and classification using relevance vector machine. Procedia Eng
38:1333–1339
Hagiwara Y, Fujita H, Oh SL, Tan JH, San Tan R, Ciaccio EJ,
Acharya UR (2018) Computer-aided diagnosis of atrial fibrilla-
tion based on ECG signals: a review. Inf Sci 467:99–114
Hannun AY, Rajpurkar P, Haghpanahi M, Tison GH, Bourn C,
Turakhia MP, Ng AY (2019) Cardiologist-level arrhythmia
detection and classification in ambulatory electrocardiograms
using a deep neural network. Nat Med 25(1):65
Hertz JA (2018) Introduction to the theory of neural computation.
CRC Press
Hou B, Yang J, Wang P, Yan R (2019) LSTM-based auto-encoder
model for ecg arrhythmias classification. IEEE Trans Instrum
Meas 69(4):1232–1240
123
1654 Iranian Journal of Science and Technology, Transactions of Electrical Engineering (2023) 47:1635–1655
Hu YH, Palreddy S, Tompkins WJ (1997) A patient-adaptable ECG
beat classifier using a mixture of experts approach. IEEE Trans
Biomed Eng 44(9):891–900
Ioffe S, Szegedy C (2015) Batch normalization: accelerating deep
network training by reducing internal covariate shift. arXiv
preprint https://arxiv.org/abs/1502.03167
Isin A, Ozdalili S (2017) Cardiac arrhythmia detection using deep
learning. Procedia Comput Sci 120:268–275
Jadhav SM, Nalbalwar SL, Ghatol A (2010) Artificial neural network
based cardiac arrhythmia classification using ECG signal data.
In: 2010 international conference on electronics and information
engineering, Vol 1, pp V1–228. IEEE
Jambukia SH, Dabhi VK, Prajapati HB (2015) Classification of ECG
signals using machine learning techniques: a survey. In: 2015
international conference on advances in computer engineering
and applications, pp 714–721. IEEE
Jun TJ, Nguyen HM, Kang D, Kim D, Kim D, Kim YH (2018) ECG
arrhythmia classification using a 2-D convolutional neural
network. arXiv preprint https://arxiv.org/abs/1804.06812
Karlik B, Olgac AV (2011) Performance analysis of various
activation functions in generalized MLP architectures of neural
networks. Int J Artif Intell Expert Syst 1(4):111–122
Karpagachelvi S, Arthanari M, Sivakumar M (2010) ECG feature
extraction techniques-a survey approach. arXiv preprint https://
arxiv.org/abs/1005.0957
Khatibi T, Rabinezhadsadatmahaleh N (2020) Proposing feature
engineering method based on deep learning and K-NNs for ECG
beat classification and arrhythmia detection. Phys Eng Sci Med
43(1):49–68
Kiranyaz S, Ince T, Gabbouj M (2015) Real-time patient-specific
ECG classification by 1-D convolutional neural networks. IEEE
Trans Biomed Eng 63(3):664–675
Li H, Yuan D, Ma X, Cui D, Cao L (2017) Genetic algorithm for the
optimization of features and neural networks in ECG signals
classification. Sci Rep 7:41011
Li J, Si Y, Xu T, Jiang S (2018) Deep convolutional neural network
based ECG classification system using information fusion and
one-hot encoding techniques. Math Probl Eng. https://doi.org/10.
1155/2018/7354081
Luz EJDS, Schwartz WR, Cámara-Chávez G, Menotti D (2016) ECG-
based heartbeat classification for arrhythmia detection: a survey.
Comput Methods Progr Biomed 127:144–164
Mitra M, Samanta RK (2013) Cardiac arrhythmia classification using
neural networks with selected features. Procedia Technol
10:76–84
Mohapatra SK, Srivastava G, Mohanty MN (2019) Arrhythmia
classification using deep neural network. In 2019 International
Conference on Applied Machine Learning (ICAML),
pp 296–300. IEEE
Moody GB, Mark RG (2001) The impact of the MIT-BIH arrhythmia
database. IEEE Eng Med Biol Mag 20(3):45–50
Mustaqeem A, Anwar SM, Majid M (2018) Multiclass classification
of cardiac arrhythmia using improved feature selection and SVM
invariants. Comput Math Methods Med. https://doi.org/10.1155/
2018/7310496
Nasiri JA, Naghibzadeh M, Yazdi HS, Naghibzadeh B (2009) ECG
arrhythmia classification with support vector machines and
genetic algorithm. In: 2009 Third UKSim European symposium
on computer modeling and simulation, pp 187–192. IEEE
Osowski S, Hoai LT, Markiewicz T (2004) Support vector machine-
based expert system for reliable heartbeat recognition. IEEE
Trans Biomed Eng 51(4):582–589
Picon A, Irusta U, Álvarez-Gila A, Aramendi E, Alonso-Atienza F,
Figuera C, Eftestøl T (2019) Mixed convolutional and long
short-term memory network for the detection of lethal ventric-
ular arrhythmia. PLoS ONE 14(5):e0216756
123
Pławiak P, Acharya UR (2020) Novel deep genetic ensemble of
classifiers for arrhythmia detection using ECG signals. Neural
Comput Appl 32(15):11137–11161
Polat K, Güneş S (2007) Detection of ECG arrhythmia using a
differential expert system approach based on principal compo-
nent analysis and least square support vector machine. Appl
Math Comput 186(1):898–906
Poungponsri S, Yu XH (2013) An adaptive filtering approach for
electrocardiogram (ECG) signal noise reduction using neural
networks. Neurocomputing 117:206–213
Rajkumar A, Ganesan M, Lavanya R (2019) Arrhythmia classification
on ECG using deep learning. In: 2019 5th international confer-
ence on advanced computing and communication systems
(ICACCS) pp 365–369. IEEE
Rakshit M, Das S (2018) An efficient ECG denoising methodology
using empirical mode decomposition and adaptive switching
mean filter. Biomed Signal Process Control 40:140–148
Ramkumar M, Babu CG, Priyanka GS, Kumar RS (2021) Ecg
arrhythmia signals classification using particle swarm optimiza-
tion-support vector machines optimized with independent com-
ponent analysis. In IOP Conference Series: Materials Science
and Engineering, Vol 1084, No 1, p 012009. IOP Publishing
Ruiz JT, Pérez JDB, Blázquez JRB (2018) Arrhythmia detection
using convolutional neural models. In: International symposium
on distributed computing and artificial intelligence, pp 120–127.
Springer, Cham
Sadiq JS, Arunmani G, Ravivarma P, Devi NK, Hemalatha A,
Ahamed JE (2021) Extraction of fetal ECG a semi-blind source
separation algorithm combined with parametrized kalman filter.
In: Materials today: proceedings
Sajjadi MS, Bachem O, Lucic M, Bousquet O, Gelly S (2018)
Assessing generative models via precision and recall. In:
Advances in neural information processing systems,
pp 5228–5237
Salem M, Taheri S, Yuan JS (2018) ECG arrhythmia classification
using transfer learning from 2-dimensional deep CNN features.
In 2018 IEEE biomedical circuits and systems conference
(BioCAS), pp 1–4. IEEE
Sameni R, Shamsollahi MB, Jutten C, Babaie-Zade M (2005)
Filtering noisy ECG signals using the extended Kalman filter
based on a modified dynamic ECG model. In: Computers in
cardiology, pp 1017–1020. IEEE
Savalia S, Emamian V (2018) Cardiac arrhythmia classification by
multi-layer perceptron and convolution neural networks. Bio-
engineering 5(2):35
Sayadi O, Shamsollahi MB (2009) A model-based Bayesian frame-
work for ECG beat segmentation. Physiol Meas 30(3):335
Sellami A, Hwang H (2019) A robust deep convolutional neural
network with batch-weighted loss for heartbeat classification.
Expert Syst Appl 122:75–84
Tsipouras MG, Fotiadis DI (2004) Automatic arrhythmia detection
based on time and time–frequency analysis of heart rate
variability. Comput Methods Progr Biomed 74(2):95–108
Vijaya V, Rao KK, Rama V (2011) Arrhythmia detection through
ECG feature extraction using wavelet analysis. Eur J Sci Res
66(3):441–448
Wang EK, Zhang X, Pan L (2019) Automatic classification of CAD
ECG signals with SDAE and bidirectional long short-term
network. IEEE Access 7:182873–182880
Weimann K, Conrad TO (2021) Transfer learning for ECG classi-
fication. Sci Rep 11(1):1–12
Xu X, Liu H (2020) ECG heartbeat classification using convolutional
neural networks. IEEE Access 8:8614–8619
Yang J, Bai Y, Lin F, Liu M, Hou Z, Liu X (2018) A novel
electrocardiogram arrhythmia classification method based on
Iranian Journal of Science and Technology, Transactions of Electrical Engineering (2023) 47:1635–1655 1655

stacked sparse auto-encoders and softmax regression. Int J Mach Zhang Z, Sabuncu M (2018) Generalized cross entropy loss for
Learn Cybern 9(10):1733–1740 training deep neural networks with noisy labels. In: Advances in
Ye C, Kumar BV, Coimbra MT (2012) Heartbeat classification using neural information processing systems, pp 8778–8788
morphological and dynamic features of ECG signals. IEEE Ziarani AK, Konrad A (2002) A nonlinear adaptive method of
Trans Biomed Eng 59(10):2930–2941 elimination of power line interference in ECG signals. IEEE
Yildirim Ö (2018) A novel wavelet sequence based on deep Trans Biomed Eng 49(6):540–547
bidirectional LSTM network model for ECG signal classifica-
tion. Comput Biol Med 96:189–202
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds
Yildirim O, Baloglu UB, Tan RS, Ciaccio EJ, Acharya UR (2019) A
exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the
new approach for arrhythmia classification using deep coded
author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the
features and LSTM networks. Comput Methods Progr Biomed
accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the
176:121–133
terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
Zhai X, Tin C (2018) Automated ECG classification using dual
heartbeat coupling based on convolutional neural network. IEEE
Access 6:27465–27472

123