Improving Atrial Fibrillation Detection with Machine Learning Models

In this paper, we focus on feature engineering to detect Atrial Fibrillation by determining whether the heart rhythm has irregularities without patterns. We experiment with a broad spectrum of features derived from the duration of heartbeat-to-heartbeat intervals in the benchmark electrocardiogram databases MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database, MIT-BIH Atrial Fibrillation Database, and Long Term AF Database. The experiments included position-based features, fluctuation indices, standard deviations, mean average values, Shannon entropy, and statistical measures, such as compressed time series data length. The research questions are to detect the most influential features that result in the best-performing model and the impact of the training dataset. Our approach is to evaluate the model on a completely different dataset from the one it was trained on. Achieved F1 scores vary between 62,32% and 85.08%. The results prove that positional features increase the model's performance.