Comparison of Bagging and Boosting Ensemble Machine Learning Methods for Automated EMG Signal Classification

The neuromuscular disorders are diagnosed using electromyographic (EMG) signals. Machine learning algorithms are employed as a decision support system to diagnose neuromuscular disorders. This paper compares bagging and boosting ensemble learning methods to classify EMG signals automatically. Even though ensemble classifiers' efficacy in relation to real-life issues has been presented in numerous studies, there are almost no studies which focus on the feasibility of bagging and boosting ensemble classifiers to diagnose the neuromuscular disorders. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to assess the feasibility of bagging and boosting ensemble classifiers to diagnose neuromuscular disorders through the use of EMG signals. It should be understood that there are three steps to this method, where the step number one is to calculate the wavelet packed coefficients (WPC) for every type of EMG signal. After this, it is necessary to calculate statistical values of WPC so that the distribution of wavelet coefficients could be demonstrated. In the last step, an ensemble classifier used the extracted features as an input of the classifier to diagnose the neuromuscular disorders. Experimental results showed the ensemble classifiers achieved better performance for diagnosis of neuromuscular disorders. Results are promising and showed that the AdaBoost with random forest ensemble method achieved an accuracy of 99.08%, F-measure 0.99, AUC 1, and kappa statistic 0.99.