Heart Sound Classification for Early Detection of Cardiovascular Diseases Using XGBoost and Engineered Acoustic Features

Heart sound-based detection of cardiovascular diseases is a critical task in clinical diagnostics, where early and accurate identification can significantly improve patient outcomes. In this study, we investigate the effectiveness of combining traditional acoustic features and transformer-based Wav2Vec embeddings with advanced machine learning models for multi-class classification of five heart sound categories. Ten engineered acoustic features, i.e., Log Mel, MFCC, delta, delta-delta, chroma, discrete wavelet transform, zero-crossing rate, energy, spectral centroid, and temporal flatness, were extracted as regular features. Four model configurations were evaluated: a hybrid CNN + LSTM and XGBoost trained with either regular features or Wav2Vec embeddings. Models were assessed using a held-out test set with hyperparameter tuning and cross-validation. Results demonstrate that models trained on regular features consistently outperform Wav2Vec-based models, with XGBoost achieving the highest accuracy of 99%, surpassing the hybrid model at 98%. These findings highlight the importance of domain-specific feature engineering and the effectiveness of ensemble learning with XGBoost for robust and accurate heart sound classification, offering a promising approach for early detection and intervention in cardiovascular diseases.