Evaluation of Machine Learning Algorithms for Emotions Recognition using Electrocardiogram

In recent studies, researchers have focused on using various modalities to recognize emotions for different applications. A major challenge is identifying emotions correctly with only electrocardiograms (ECG) as the modality. The main objective is to reduce costs by using single-modality ECG signals to predict human emotional states. This paper presents an emotion recognition approach utilizing the heart rate variability features obtained from ECG with feature selection techniques (exhaustive feature selection (EFS) and Pearson’s correlation) to train the classification models. Seven machine learning (ML) models: multi-layer perceptrons (MLP), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Decision Tree (DT), Gradient Boosting Decision Tree (GBDT), Logistic Regression, Adaboost and Extra Tree classifier are used to classify emotional state. Two public datasets, DREAMER and SWELL are used for evaluation. The results show that no particular ML works best for all data. For DREAMER with EFS, the best models to predict valence, arousal, and dominance are Extra Tree (74.6%), MLP and DT (74.6%), and GBDT and DT (69.8%), respectively. Extra tree with Pearson’s correlation are the best method for the ECG SWELL dataset and provide 100% accuracy. The usage of Extra tree classifier and feature selection technique contributes to the improvement of the model accuracy. Moreover, the Friedman test proved that ET is as good as other classification models for predicting human emotional state and ranks highest.