There are many optimisation techniques recently published. However, there are evidences that there is no difference among these algorithms. I think that using the old style optimisation methods is better. Try to use PSO, GA, Simulated annealing, and the other mature algorithms.
There are many feature extraction techniques (MMFS, PCA, MPCA, Neural Networks, GA) The main differences between them lies on the computing costs (massive CPU times). I enclose for you one of the thesis that applies some of these feature extraction techniques on ECG signals.