Abstract. Early diagnosis and classification of long term cardiac signals are crucial issues in the treatment of heart related disorders. The available number of medical professional are not sufficient to deal with the increase patients for which design of certain machine based diagnostics tools have been accepted as a viable option. Typical Electrocardiogram (ECG) machine is helpful for monitoring the heart abnormalities only for short interval of time. Therefore, it becomes necessary to design a system which captures relevant features of the ECG signal for use with certain classifiers. In our proposed system, ECG signal elements like Q, R and S peaks are detected and heart rate estimated using Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), Adaptive Linear Discriminant Analysis (ALDA) and Support Vector Machine (SVM). For our work we have been used MIT BIH (Standard Arrhythmia Database).