Classification of epileptic EEG signals with the utilization of Bonferroni mean based fuzzy pattern tree

The Electroencephalogram (EEG) is an essential tool used to detect and investigate multiple neurological disorders within the human brain. However, examination and visualization of any such abnormalities in the brain through inspecting these EEG signals is a time-consuming and repetitive task for a neurologist. Hence, there is a need to develop a model that can automatically classify brain disorders based on the EEG signals. In this study, a novel fuzzy classification model is proposed for classifying the EEG signals. First, the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) technique is employed to decompose the signal into time-frequency sub-bands. Then, by utilizing these sub-bands, seven meaningful statistical features are extracted effectively for additional investigation purposes. Then, the retrieved features are provided to the fuzzy pattern tree classifier to obtain meaningful inferences from the data. Here, a distinctive structure of a fuzzy pattern tree is proposed by utilizing the interrelationship handling aggregation operators. More precisely, we utilize the Bonferroni mean (BM) aggregation operator for the enlargement or expansion of the tree while considering the concatenation between the parent and the slave tree. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that presents such an interrelationship handling fuzzy logic-based classifier model for EEG signal classification. The proposed algorithm is evaluated using two publicly available datasets, namely the Bonn University (Bonn) epileptic datasets and the Temple University Hospital (TUH) EEG subcorpus of abnormal (TUAB) and epilepsy (TUEP) datasets. This study considers different frames of the binary problem (i.e., healthy vs. seizure detection) and multi-class problem (i.e., healthy vs. seizure free vs. seizure) over the Bonn dataset and achieves more than 99% accuracy over the binary model by testing over all possible combinations of the available experimental dataset and 97.8% accuracy in multi-class model. In the case of TUAB and TUEP categories, the model achieves an accuracy of 88% in predicting normal to abnormal activities and 86% in detecting epilepsy and non-epilepsy within the signals. The outcomes derived from the proposed model outperform some existing studies available in the literature for EEG signal classification. Also, the model is efficient as it considers the uncertainty and association among the features while framing the classifier model.