arXiv AI By Jiawei Li, Fabio Bonassi, Johan Sundstr\"om, Thomas B. Sch\"on, Ant\^onio H. Ribeiro

On the role of the tokenizer in ECG transformer models

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The study investigates how different tokenization methods affect ECG Transformer models by comparing eight strategies across four backbone architectures on the CPSC2018 classification task. Physiology-aware tokenizations such as Median-beat and HeartLang achieve higher mean macro-AUCs (0.893 and 0.889) than point-wise and patch-wise approaches (0.822 and 0.824), while also reducing sequence length and training memory usage. Combining the two physiology-aware representations further improves macro-AUC by 8.2%.

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