Analysis of statistical coefficients and autoregressive parameters over intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) for epileptic...

Epilepsy is a persistent neurological disorder impacting over 50 million people around the world. It is characterized by repeated seizures defined as brief episodes of involuntary movement that might entail the human body. Electroencephalography (EEG) signals are usually used for the detection of epileptic seizures. This paper introduces a new feature extraction method for the classification of seizure and seizure-free EEG time segments. The proposed method relies on the empirical mode decomposition (EMD), statistics and autoregressive (AR) parameters. The EMD method decomposes an EEG time segment into a finite set of intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) from which statistical coefficients and autoregressive parameters are computed. Nevertheless, the calculated features could be of high dimension as the number of IMFs increases, the Student's t-test and the Mann-Whitney U test were thus employed for features ranking in order to withdraw lower significant features. The obtained features have been used for the classification of seizure and seizure-free EEG signals by the application of a feed-forward multilayer perceptron neural network (MLPNN) classifier. Experimental results carried out on the EEG database provided by the University of Bonn, Germany, demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method which performance assessed by the classification accuracy (CA) is compared to other existing performances reported in the literature.