Bridging Signal Intelligence and Clinical Insight: A Comprehensive Review of Feature Engineering, Model Interpretability, and Machine Learning in Biomedical Signal Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Biomedical signal analysis underpins modern healthcare by enabling accurate diagnosis, continuous physiological monitoring, and informed patient management. While deep learning excels at automated feature extraction and end-to-end modeling, classical ML remains essential for tasks requiring interpretability, data efficiency, and clinical transparency. This review synthesizes advances in ML methods including Support Vector Machines, Random Forests, and Decision Trees focusing on physiologically informed feature engineering, robust feature selection, and meaningful model interpretation. We provide guidelines for signal preprocessing, domain-specific feature extraction, and selection strategies across standard biomedical signals such as electrocardiograms (ECGs), electromyograms (EMGs), electroencephalograms (EEGs), Electrovestibulography (EVestG), and tracheal breathing sounds (TBSs). Reviewing TBS studies illustrates an end-to-end workflow highlighting common features and classifiers alongside practical challenges and solutions. Reported ML application performance ranges from 85 to 94% accuracy for EEG, ECG, and EMG, to 82% specificity for TBSs, emphasizing the trade-off between interpretability and predictive performance. Marginal accuracy gains alone do not constitute meaningful progress unless they enhance clinical insight, actionable decision-making, or model transparency. Finally, we compare ML with DL, discuss strengths and limitations, and provide recommendations and future directions for developing robust, interpretable, and clinically relevant biomedical ML.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".