A category incremental continuous learning model for imbalance arrhythmia detection

Abstract The development of efficient arrhythmia detection systems is crucial for physiological measurements and computer-aided diagnosis. Existing systems rely mainly on offline learning methods and lack the ability to assimilate new data or recognize emerging categories. To address these challenges, this study introduces an arrhythmia detection model that is resistant to data imbalance and has continuous learning capabilities, specifically for incremental learning of new ECG data categories. The system incorporates constraints derived from the new class data and implements a dynamic mechanism for updating connection weights, facilitating the incremental continual learning of classes. Confronted with the problem of models forgetting the original data and overfitting with the added data in continuous learning, we introduce a data balancing method by regularization to balance the model’s memory and learning of the two types of data. Facing the data imbalance problem in continuous learning, we introduce a posteriori probability weighting strategy. This strategy assigns greater importance to high-value samples based on the model’s posterior residual kernel density estimates. Comprehensive testing of the model using various datasets from the MIT-BIH database indicates superior performance in incremental learning tasks. The results reveal that the model not only excels in class incremental learning but also ensures effective balancing across different data classes.