Measuring the dissimilarity between EEG recordings through a non-linear dynamical system approach

A new measure of dissimilarity between two EEG segments is proposed. It is derived from the application of the mathematical concept of distance between series of one-step predictions according to the estimated non-linear autoregressive functions. The non-linear autoregressive estimation is performed by non-parametric regression using kernel estimators. The possibility of applying this measure for automatic classification of EEG segments is explored. For this purpose multidimensional scaling and cluster analyses are applied on the basis of the calculated dissimilarity measures. In particular, its application to different EEG segments with delta activity and also with alpha waves reveals high agreement with visual classification by EEG specialists.