Classification of cardiotocograms using random forest classifier and selection of important features from cardiotocogram signal

In obstetrics, cardiotocography is a procedure to record the fetal heartbeat and the uterine contractions usually during the last trimester of pregnancy. It helps to monitor patterns associated with the fetal activity and to detect the pathologies. In this paper, random forest classifier is used to classify normal, suspicious and pathological patterns based on the features extracted from the cardiotocograms. The results showed that random forest classifier can detect these classes successfully with overall classification accuracy of 93.6%. Moreover, important features are identified to reduce the feature space. It is found that using seven important features, similar classification accuracy can be achieved by random forest classifier (93.3%).