Abstract
In this paper, we propose a novel classification system for ECG signals based on particle swarm optimization (PSO). The main objective of this system is to optimize the performance of the support vector machine (SVM) classifier in terms of accuracy by automatically: i) searching for the best subset of features where to carry out the classification task; and ii) solving the SVM model selection issue. Experiments conducted on the basis of ECG data from the MIT-BIH arrhythmia database to classify five kinds of abnormal waveforms and normal beats confirm the effectiveness of the proposed PSO-SVM classification system.