This work aims at presenting a methodology for electrocardiogram (ECG)-based arrhythmia disease detection using genetic algorithm (GA)-optimized k-means clustering. The open-source ECG data from MIT-BIH arrhythmia database and MIT-BIH normal sinus rhythm database are subjected to a sequence of steps including segmentation using R-point detection, extraction of features using principal component analysis (PCA), and pattern classification. Here, the classical classifiers viz., k-means clustering, error back propagation neural network (EBPNN), and support vector machine (SVM) have been initially attempted and subsequently m-fold (m = 3) cross validation is used to reduce the bias during training of the classifier. The average classification accuracy is computed as the average over all the three folds. It is observed that EBPNN and SVM with different order polynomial kernel provide significant accuracies in comparison with k-means one. In fact, the parameters (centroids) of k-means algorithm are locally optimized by minimizing its objective function. In order to overcome this limitation, a global optimization technique viz., GA is suggested here and implemented to find more robust parameters of k-means clustering. Finally, it is shown that GA-optimized k-means algorithm enhances its accuracy to those of other classifiers. The results are discussed and compared. It is concluded that the GA-optimized k-means algorithm is an alternate approach for classification whose accuracy will be near to that of supervised (viz., EBPNN and SVM) classifiers.
