Patient-independent hybrid generative-discriminative modeling for seizure detection in long-term scalp EEG

Automated seizure detection from long-term scalp electroencephalography (EEG) remains challenging because seizure windows are sparse, channel configurations vary across patients, and clinically useful systems must maintain strict control of false alarms. This study presents a patient-independent hybrid generative-discriminative framework evaluated on the CHB-MIT cohort under leave-one-patient-out cross-validation. In each outer fold, one patient was reserved exclusively for final testing, whereas channel harmonization, representation learning, feature refinement, model training, and operating-point calibration were performed using only the remaining patients. A fold-specific convolutional β-variational autoencoder ([Formula: see text]) was trained on interictal windows from the training patients only. For each window, latent statistics and reconstruction error were combined with handcrafted seizure-sensitive descriptors, followed by train-only sanitization and supervised feature selection. Candidate boosted-tree classifiers, namely LightGBM, CatBoost, and XGBoost, were trained within the training pool, and operating parameters were selected on validation data only. Final performance was then computed on the held-out patient using window-level metrics with record-wise temporal postprocessing. Across the 24 held-out evaluation cases, corresponding to 23 distinct individuals in the public CHB-MIT release, the framework achieved mean accuracy of 0.9964, mean balanced accuracy of 0.9411, mean specificity of 0.9967, and mean false alarms per hour of 4.7154. Across seizure-positive held-out cases, the mean sensitivity, F1-score, ROC-AUC, and average precision were 0.5505, 0.3543, 0.9496, and 0.2990, respectively. These findings show that leakage-safe hybrid representation learning can support seizure detection while explicitly handling heterogeneous channels, severe class imbalance, and false-alarm control in long-term scalp EEG.