A Weighted Graph Attention Network Based Method for Multi-label Classification of Electrocardiogram Abnormalities
Hongmei Wang, Wei Zhao, Zhiyang Li, Dongya Jia, Cong Yan, Jing Hu, Jiansheng Fang, Ming–Hsuan Yang
Abstract
The multi-label electrocardiogram (ECG) classification is to automatically predict a set of concurrent cardiac abnormalities in an ECG record, which is significant for clinical diagnosis. Modeling the cardiac abnormality dependencies is the key to improving classification performance. To capture the dependencies, we proposed a multi-label classification method based on the weighted graph attention networks. In the study, a graph taking each class as a node was mapped and the class dependencies were represented by the weights of graph edges. A novel weights generation method was proposed by combining the self-attentional weights and the prior learned co-occurrence knowledge of classes. The algorithm was evaluated on the dataset of the Hefei Hi-tech Cup ECG Intelligent Competition for 34 kinds of ECG abnormalities classification. And the micro-f 1 and the macro-f 1 of cross validation respectively were 91.45% and 44.48%. The experiment results show that the proposed method can model class dependencies and improve classification performance.