A novel approach for classification of normal/abnormal phonocardiogram recordings using temporal signal analysis and machine learning

This paper discusses a novel approach used for classification of phonocardiogram (PCG) excerpts into normal and abnormal classes as a part of Physionet 2016 challenge [10]. The dataset used for the competition comprises of cardiac abnormalities such as mitral valve prolapse (MVP), benign murmurs, aortic diseases, coronary artery disease, miscellaneous pathological conditions etc. [3], We present the approach used for classification from a general machine learning application standpoint, giving details on feature extraction, type of classifiers used comparing their performances individually and in combination. We propose a technique which leverages previous research on feature extraction with a novel approach to modeling temporal dynamics of the signal using Markov chain analysis [7,9]. These newly introduced Markov features along with other statistical and frequency domain features, trained over an ensemble of artificial neural networks and gradient boosting trees, with bagging, gave us an accuracy of 82% on the validation dataset provided in the competition and was consistent with the test data with the best result of 78%.