Abstract:Epilepsy, affecting approximately 50 million people globally, is characterized by abnormal brain activity and remains challenging to treat. The diagnosis of epilepsy relies heavily on electroencephalogram (EEG) data, where specialists manually analyze epileptiform patterns across pre-ictal, ictal, post-ictal, and interictal periods. However, the manual analysis of EEG signals is prone to variability between experts, emphasizing the need for automated solutions. Although previous studies have explored preprocessing techniques and machine learning approaches for seizure detection, there is a gap in understanding how the representation of EEG data (time, frequency, or time-frequency domains) impacts the predictive performance of deep learning models. This work addresses this gap by systematically comparing deep neural networks trained on EEG data in these three domains. Through the use of statistical tests, we identify the optimal data representation and model architecture for epileptic seizure detection. The results demonstrate that frequency-domain data achieves detection metrics exceeding 97\%, providing a robust foundation for more accurate and reliable seizure detection systems.
Abstract:Epilepsy is one of the most common neurological disorders that can be diagnosed through electroencephalogram (EEG), in which the following epileptic events can be observed: pre-ictal, ictal, post-ictal, and interictal. In this paper, we present a novel method for epilepsy detection into two differentiation contexts: binary and multiclass classification. For feature extraction, a total of 105 measures were extracted from power spectrum, spectrogram, and bispectrogram. For classifier building, eight different machine learning algorithms were used. Our method was applied in a widely used EEG database. As a result, random forest and backpropagation based on multilayer perceptron algorithms reached the highest accuracy for binary (98.75%) and multiclass (96.25%) classification problems, respectively. Subsequently, the statistical tests did not find a model that would achieve a better performance than the other classifiers. In the evaluation based on confusion matrices, it was also not possible to identify a classifier that stands out in relation to other models for EEG classification. Even so, our results are promising and competitive with the findings in the literature.