ADHDeepNet From Raw EEG to Diagnosis: Improving ADHD Diagnosis through Temporal-Spatial Processing, Adaptive Attention Mechanisms, and Explainability in Raw EEG Signals

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a common brain disorder in children that can persist into adulthood, affecting social, academic, and career life. Early diagnosis is crucial for managing these impacts on patients and the healthcare system but is often labor-intensive and time-consuming. This paper presents a novel method to improve ADHD diagnosis precision and timeliness by leveraging Deep Learning (DL) approaches and electroencephalogram (EEG) signals. We introduce ADHDeepNet, a DL model that utilizes comprehensive temporal-spatial characterization, attention modules, and explainability techniques optimized for EEG signals. ADHDeepNet integrates feature extraction and refinement processes to enhance ADHD diagnosis. The model was trained and validated on a dataset of 121 participants (61 ADHD, 60 Healthy Controls), employing nested cross-validation for robust performance. The proposed two-stage methodology uses a 10-fold cross-subject validation strategy. Initially, each iteration optimizes the model's hyper-parameters with inner 2-fold cross-validation. Then, Additive Gaussian Noise (AGN) with various standard deviations and magnification levels is applied for data augmentation. ADHDeepNet achieved 100% sensitivity and 99.17% accuracy in classifying ADHD/HC subjects. To clarify model explainability and identify key brain regions and frequency bands for ADHD diagnosis, we analyzed the learned weights and activation patterns of the model's primary layers. Additionally, t-distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE) visualized high-dimensional data, aiding in interpreting the model's decisions. This study highlights the potential of DL and EEG in enhancing ADHD diagnosis accuracy and efficiency.

Transforming Social Science Research with Transfer Learning: Social Science Survey Data Integration with AI

Large-N nationally representative surveys, which have profoundly shaped American politics scholarship, represent related but distinct domains -a key condition for transfer learning applications. These surveys are related through their shared demographic, party identification, and ideological variables, yet differ in that individual surveys often lack specific policy preference questions that researchers require. Our study introduces a novel application of transfer learning (TL) to address these gaps, marking the first systematic use of TL paradigms in the context of survey data. Specifically, models pre-trained on the Cooperative Election Study (CES) dataset are fine-tuned for use in the American National Election Studies (ANES) dataset to predict policy questions based on demographic variables. Even with a naive architecture, our transfer learning approach achieves approximately 92 percentage accuracy in predicting missing variables across surveys, demonstrating the robust potential of this method. Beyond this specific application, our paper argues that transfer learning is a promising framework for maximizing the utility of existing survey data. We contend that artificial intelligence, particularly transfer learning, opens new frontiers in social science methodology by enabling systematic knowledge transfer between well-administered surveys that share common variables but differ in their outcomes of interest.