Pulse waveform classification using support vector machine with Gaussian time warp edit distance kernel

Advances in signal processing techniques have provided effective tools for quantitative research in traditional Chinese pulse diagnosis. However, because of the inevitable intraclass variations of pulse patterns, the automatic classification of pulse waveforms has remained a difficult problem. Utilizing the new elastic metric, that is, time wrap edit distance (TWED), this paper proposes to address the problem under the support vector machines (SVM) framework by using the Gaussian TWED kernel function. The proposed method, SVM with GTWED kernel (GTWED-SVM), is evaluated on a dataset including 2470 pulse waveforms of five distinct patterns. The experimental results show that the proposed method achieves a lower average error rate than current pulse waveform classification methods.