In this paper, we proposed an algorithm for arrhythmia classification, which is associated with the reduction of feature dimensions by linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and a support vector machine (SVM) based classifier. Seventeen original input features were extracted from preprocessed signals by wavelet transform, and attempts were then made to reduce these to 4 features, the linear combination of original features, by LDA. The performance of the SVM classifier with reduced features by LDA showed higher than with that by principal component analysis (PCA) and even with original features. For a cross-validation procedure, this SVM classifier was compared with Multilayer Perceptrons (MLP) and Fuzzy Inference System (FIS) classifiers. When all classifiers used the same reduced features, the overall performance of the SVM classifier was comprehensively superior to all others. Especially, the accuracy of discrimination of normal sinus rhythm (NSR), arterial premature contraction (APC), supraventricular tachycardia (SVT), premature ventricular contraction (PVC), ventricular tachycardia (VT) and ventricular fibrillation (VF) were $99.307\%,;99.274\%,;99.854\%,;98.344\%,;99.441\%;and;99.883\%$, respectively. And, even with smaller learning data, the SVM classifier offered better performance than the MLP classifier.