Automatic identification of epileptic and background EEG signals using frequency domain parameters

The analysis of electroencephalograms continues to be a problem due to our limited understanding of the signal origin. This limited understanding leads to ill-defined models, which in turn make it hard to design effective evaluation methods. Despite these shortcomings, electroencephalogram analysis is a valuable tool in the evaluation of neurological disorders and the evaluation of overall cerebral activity. We compared different model based power spectral density estimation methods and different classification methods. Specifically, we used the autoregressive moving average as well as from Yule-Walker and Burg's methods, to extract the power density spectrum from representative signal samples. Local maxima and minima were detected from these spectra. In this paper, the locations of these extrema are used as input to different classifiers. The three classifiers we used were: Gaussian mixture model, artificial neural network, and support vector machine. The classification results are documented with confusion matrices and compared with receiver operating characteristic curves. We found that Burg's method for spectrum estimation together with a support vector machine classifier yields the best classification results. This combination reaches a classification rate of 93.33%, the sensitivity is 98.33% and the specificy is 96.67%.