Arrhythmia classification algorithm based on multi-head self-attention mechanism

•ECG signal preprocessing method based on wavelet transform to reduce noise.•Linear projection layer is designed to acquire semantic features of ECG signal.•Novel position encoding is proposed to obtain time and voltage series information.•Novel arrhythmia classification algorithm based on multihead self-attention mechanism.•The proposed ACA-MA outperforms other state-of-the-art methods.