Deep Neural Network Architectures for Electrocardiogram Classification: A Comprehensive Evaluation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Song, Yun, Zheng, Wenjia, Chen, Tiedan, Wang, Ziyu, Shi, Jiazhao, Chen, Yisong
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Song, Yun
Zheng, Wenjia
Chen, Tiedan
Wang, Ziyu
Shi, Jiazhao
Chen, Yisong
author_facet Song, Yun
Zheng, Wenjia
Chen, Tiedan
Wang, Ziyu
Shi, Jiazhao
Chen, Yisong
contents With the rising prevalence of cardiovascular diseases, electrocardiograms (ECG) remain essential for the non-invasive detection of cardiac abnormalities. This study presents a comprehensive evaluation of deep neural network architectures for automated arrhythmia classification, integrating temporal modeling, attention mechanisms, and ensemble strategies. To address data scarcity in minority classes, the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia dataset was augmented using a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). We developed and compared four distinct architectures, including Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), CNN combined with Long Short-Term Memory (CNN-LSTM), CNN-LSTM with Attention, and 1D Residual Networks (ResNet-1D), to capture both local morphological features and long-term temporal dependencies. Performance was rigorously evaluated using accuracy, F1-score, and Area Under the Curve (AUC) with 95\% confidence intervals to ensure statistical robustness, while Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM) was employed to validate model interpretability. Experimental results indicate that the CNN-LSTM model achieved the optimal stand-alone balance between sensitivity and specificity, yielding an F1-score of 0.951. Conversely, the CNN-LSTM-Attention and ResNet-1D models exhibited higher sensitivity to class imbalance. To mitigate this, a dynamic ensemble fusion strategy was introduced; specifically, the Top2-Weighted ensemble achieved the highest overall performance with an F1-score of 0.958. These findings demonstrate that leveraging complementary deep architectures significantly enhances classification reliability, providing a robust and interpretable foundation for intelligent arrhythmia detection systems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_17701
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Deep Neural Network Architectures for Electrocardiogram Classification: A Comprehensive Evaluation
Song, Yun
Zheng, Wenjia
Chen, Tiedan
Wang, Ziyu
Shi, Jiazhao
Chen, Yisong
Signal Processing
Machine Learning
With the rising prevalence of cardiovascular diseases, electrocardiograms (ECG) remain essential for the non-invasive detection of cardiac abnormalities. This study presents a comprehensive evaluation of deep neural network architectures for automated arrhythmia classification, integrating temporal modeling, attention mechanisms, and ensemble strategies. To address data scarcity in minority classes, the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia dataset was augmented using a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). We developed and compared four distinct architectures, including Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), CNN combined with Long Short-Term Memory (CNN-LSTM), CNN-LSTM with Attention, and 1D Residual Networks (ResNet-1D), to capture both local morphological features and long-term temporal dependencies. Performance was rigorously evaluated using accuracy, F1-score, and Area Under the Curve (AUC) with 95\% confidence intervals to ensure statistical robustness, while Gradient-weighted Class Activation Mapping (Grad-CAM) was employed to validate model interpretability. Experimental results indicate that the CNN-LSTM model achieved the optimal stand-alone balance between sensitivity and specificity, yielding an F1-score of 0.951. Conversely, the CNN-LSTM-Attention and ResNet-1D models exhibited higher sensitivity to class imbalance. To mitigate this, a dynamic ensemble fusion strategy was introduced; specifically, the Top2-Weighted ensemble achieved the highest overall performance with an F1-score of 0.958. These findings demonstrate that leveraging complementary deep architectures significantly enhances classification reliability, providing a robust and interpretable foundation for intelligent arrhythmia detection systems.
title Deep Neural Network Architectures for Electrocardiogram Classification: A Comprehensive Evaluation
topic Signal Processing
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.17701