A Case Study of Artificial Neural Network Compression Methods for Resource-Constrained Multi-Label Classification

Proliferation of wearable healthcare devices has created the need to deliver artificial intelligence applications for these resource-constrained devices to achieve faster, localized decision-making, by bringing computation closer to the data sources, for improved responsiveness and privacy. This contribution presents the results of an experimental evaluation of artificial neural network compression techniques, including quantization, structured pruning, and knowledge distillation, applied to multi-label classification of electrocardiogram (ECG) signals. The experiments were carried out on the PTB-XL dataset using three deep learning models, i.e. an LSTM-based recurrent neural network, a 1D convolutional neural network, and a 1D residual neural network. The results show how the compression methods impact model quality and highlight opportunities to reduce model size and accelerate inference, thereby enabling effective deployment on resource-constrained, edge devices.