An Ensemble Learning Approach for Electrocardiogram Sensor Based Human Emotion Recognition

• Main Authors: Theekshana Dissanayake, Yasitha Rajapaksha, Roshan Ragel, Isuru Nawinne
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2019-10-01
• Series: Sensors
• Subjects: bio-signal processing; wearable computing; ensemble learning; electrocardiogram; machine learning
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/19/20/4495

Recently, researchers in the area of biosensor based human emotion recognition have used different types of machine learning models for recognizing human emotions. However, most of them still lack the ability to recognize human emotions with higher classification accuracy incorporating a limited number of bio-sensors. In the domain of machine learning, ensemble learning methods have been successfully applied to solve different types of real-world machine learning problems which require improved classification accuracies. Emphasising on that, this research suggests an ensemble learning approach for developing a machine learning model that can recognize four major human emotions namely: anger; sadness; joy; and pleasure incorporating electrocardiogram (ECG) signals. As feature extraction methods, this analysis combines four ECG signal based techniques, namely: heart rate variability; empirical mode decomposition; with-in beat analysis; and frequency spectrum analysis. The first three feature extraction methods are well-known ECG based feature extraction techniques mentioned in the literature, and the fourth technique is a novel method proposed in this study. The machine learning procedure of this investigation evaluates the performance of a set of well-known ensemble learners for emotion classification and further improves the classification results using feature selection as a prior step to ensemble model training. Compared to the best performing single biosensor based model in the literature, the developed ensemble learner has the accuracy gain of 10.77%. Furthermore, the developed model outperforms most of the multiple biosensor based emotion recognition models with a significantly higher classification accuracy gain.