Despite the multiple studies dealing with heartbeat classification, the accurate detection of Supraventricular heartbeats (SVEB) is still very challenging. Therefore, this study aims to question the current protocol followed to report heartbeat classification results, which impedes the improvement of the SVEB class without falling on over-fitting. In this study, a novel approach based on Variational Mode Decomposition (VMD) as source of features is proposed, and the impact of the use of the

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... the use of the MIT-BIH Arrhythmia database is analyzed.The method proposed is based on single-lead electrocardiogram, and it characterizes heartbeats by a set of 45 features: 5 related to the time intervals between consecutive heartbeats, and the rest related to VMD. Each heartbeat is decomposed in their variational modes, which are, on their turn, characterized by their frequency content, morphology and higher order statistics. The 10 most relevant features are selected using a backwards wrapper feature selector, and they are fed into an LS-SVM classifier, which is trained to separate Normal (N), Supraventricular (SVEB), Ventricular (VEB) and Fusion (F) heartbeats. An inter-patient approach, using patient independent training, is considered as suggested in the literature.The method achieves sensitivities above 80% for the three most important classes of the database (N, SVEB and VEB), and high specificities for the N and VEB classes. Given the challenges related to the SVEB and F class present in the literature, the composition of the MIT-BIH database is analyzed and alternatives are suggested in order to train heartbeat classification algorithms in a novel and more realistic way.