Seizure prediction with bipolar spectral power features using Adaboost and SVM classifiers

This paper presents the results of our study on finding a lower complexity and yet a robust seizure prediction method using intracranial electroencephalogram (iEEG) recordings. We compare two classifiers: a low-complexity Adaboost and the more complex support vector machine (SVM). Adaboost is a linear classier using decision stumps, and SVM uses a nonlinear Gaussian kernel. Bipolar and/or time-differential spectral power features of different sub-bands are extracted from the iEEG signal. Adaboost is used to simultaneously classify as well as rank the features. Eliminating the low discriminating features reduces computational complexity and power consumption. The top features selected by Adaboost were also used as a feature set for SVM classification. The outputs of classifiers are regularized by applying a moving-average window and a threshold is used to generate alarms. The proposed methods were applied on 8 invasive recordings selected from the EPILEPSIAE database, the European database of EEG seizure recordings. Doublecross validation is used by separating data sets for training and optimization from testing. The key conclusion is that Adaboost performs slightly better than SVM using a reduced feature set on average with significantly less complexity resulting in a sensitivity of 77.1% (27 of 35 seizures in 873 h recordings) and a false alarm rate of 0.18 per hour.