Machine learning–enabled ECG arrhythmia classification: a systematic and educational study from signal processing to decision support

Electrocardiogram (ECG) signals play a critical role in the early detection of cardiac arrhythmias, which remain a major cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. While deep learning approaches have achieved high classification accuracy, their increasing complexity often limits interpretability and practical applicability. This study presents a systematic and interpretable framework for multi-class ECG arrhythmia classification, examining the effects of signal processing, feature extraction, feature selection, and evaluation strategies on classification performance. Experiments were conducted on the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database using two feature representations: (i) morphological and temporal features, and (ii) a compact wavelet-based representation. Sequential Forward Feature Selection (SFFS) revealed that classification performance saturates at approximately 15 features, indicating that most discriminative information is captured within a compact subset. Using this feature space, the support vector machine (SVM) achieved the best overall performance, reaching 98.54% accuracy with stable results across different configurations. The wavelet-based representation further improved performance balance, yielding lower Golden Distance (GD) values (as low as 0.0249), indicating more consistent behavior across evaluation metrics. Overall, the results demonstrate that carefully designed feature extraction and selection enable classical machine learning methods, particularly SVM, to achieve high and reliable performance, providing an interpretable alternative to more complex black-box models in ECG arrhythmia classification.