A Cluster-Based Opposition Differential Evolution Algorithm Boosted by a Local Search for ECG Signal Classification

Electrocardiogram (ECG) signals are recordings of the heart's electrical activity and are widely used in the medical field to diagnose various cardiac conditions and monitor heart function. The accurate classification of ECG signals is crucial for the early detection and treatment of heart-related diseases. This paper proposes a novel approach based on an improved differential evolution (DE) algorithm for ECG signal classification. To this end, after the preprocessing step, we extracted several features such as BPM, IBI, and SDNN. Then, the features are fed into a multi-layer perceptron (MLP). While MLPs are still widely used for ECG signal classification, using gradient-based training methods, the most widely used algorithm for the training process, has significant disadvantages, such as the possibility of being stuck in local optimums. Population-based metaheuristic techniques have been effectively used to address this. This paper employs an enhanced differential evolution (DE) algorithm for the training process as one of the most effective population-based algorithms. To this end, we improved DE based on a clustering-based strategy, opposition-based learning, and a local search. Clustering-based strategies can act as crossover operators, while the goal of the opposition operator is to improve the exploration of the DE algorithm. The weights and biases found by the improved DE algorithm are then fed into six gradient-based local search algorithms. In other words, the weights found by the DE are employed as an initialization point. Therefore, we introduced six different algorithms for the training process (in terms of different local search algorithms). In an extensive set of experiments, we showed that our proposed training algorithm could provide better results than the conventional training algorithms.