An Interpretable Hand-Crafted Feature-Based Model for Atrial Fibrillation Detection

Rahimeh Rouhi (1) , Marianne Clausel (2) , Julien Oster (3) , Fabien Lauer (1)

1 ABC - Machine Learning and Computational Biology
2 IECL - Institut Élie Cartan de Lorraine
3 IADI - Imagerie Adaptative Diagnostique et Interventionnelle

Atrial Fibrillation (AF) is the most common type of cardiac arrhythmia. Early diagnosis of AF helps to improve therapy and prognosis. Machine Learning (ML) has been successfully applied to improve the effectiveness of Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CADx) systems for AF detection. Presenting an explanation for the decision made by an ML model is considerable from the cardiologists' point of view, which decreases the complexity of the ML model and can provide tangible information in their diagnosis. In this paper, a range of explanation techniques is applied to hand-crafted features based ML models for heart rhythm classification. We validate the impact of the techniques by applying feature selection and classification to the 2017 CinC/PhysioNet challenge dataset. The results show the effectiveness and efficiency of SHapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) technique along with Random Forest (RF) for the classification of the Electrocardiogram (ECG) signals for AF detection with a mean F-score of 0.746 compared to 0.706 for a technique based on the same features based on a cascaded SVM approach. The study also highlights how this interpretable hand-crafted feature-based model can provide cardiologists with a more compact set of features and tangible information in their diagnosis.

Mots clés: atrial fibrillation; feature importance; interpretability; feature selection; classification; computer-aided diagnosis

Domaines: Apprentissage [cs.LG]

Rahimeh Rouhi, Marianne Clausel, Julien Oster, Fabien Lauer. An Interpretable Hand-Crafted Feature-Based Model for Atrial Fibrillation Detection. Frontiers in Physiology, 2021, 12, pp.657304. ⟨10.3389/fphys.2021.657304⟩. ⟨hal-03382590⟩