Cross-Dataset Component Ablation of a Hybrid Model for Robust Beat-Level ECG Arrhythmia Classification
Jonas Mindaugas Rimšelis, Viktor Medvedev, Povilas Treigys, Žygimantas Abramikas, Jurgita Markevičiūtė, Jolita Bernatavičienė
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15439/2026F6565
Citation: Jonas Mindaugas Rimšelis, Viktor Medvedev, Povilas Treigys, Žygimantas Abramikas, Jurgita Markevičiūtė, Jolita Bernatavičienė (2026). Cross-Dataset Component Ablation of a Hybrid Model for Robust Beat-Level ECG Arrhythmia Classification. In M. Bolanowski, M. Ganzha, M. Grzegorowski, L. Maciaszek, M. Paprzycki, A. Paszkiewicz, D. Ślęzak (eds), Proceedings of the 21st Conference on Computer Science and Intelligence Systems. ACSIS, Vol. 48, pages 149–155.
Abstract. This study presents a systematic cross-dataset ablation analysis of a hybrid model for beat-level electrocardiogram (ECG) arrhythmia classification under domain shift. The proposed multi-branch architecture combines a mixture-of-experts RR encoder with waveform branches that capture local QRS morphology, global beat context, and frequency-domain information. The full model and its ablated variants were trained over five random seeds on the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia Database under the inter-patient paradigm and evaluated on both internal test subsets and an external dataset. The results indicate that the RR encoder contributes more to robustness than the waveform encoder, especially under stronger domain shift. Furthermore, RR interval-based Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM) and temporal attention have a limited impact on within-dataset evaluation but become more important in cross-dataset evaluation.
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