Automated Diagnosis of Epilepsy Employing Multifractal Detrended Fluctuation Analysis Based Features

Abstract

This contribution reports an application of MultiFractal Detrended Fluctuation Analysis, MFDFA based novel feature extraction technique for automated detection of epilepsy. In fractal geometry, Multifractal Detrended Fluctuation Analysis MFDFA is a popular technique to examine the self-similarity of a nonlinear, chaotic and noisy time series. In the present research work, EEG signals representing healthy, interictal (seizure free) and ictal activities (seizure) are acquired from an existing available database. The acquired EEG signals of different states are at first analyzed using MFDFA. To requisite the time series singularity quantification at local and global scales, a novel set of fourteen different features. Suitable feature ranking employing students t-test has been done to select the most statistically significant features which are henceforth being used as inputs to a support vector machines (SVM) classifier for the classification of different EEG signals. Eight different classification problems have been presented in this paper and it has been observed that the overall classification accuracy using MFDFA based features are reasonably satisfactory for all classification problems. The performance of the proposed method are also found to be quite commensurable and in some cases even better when compared with the results published in existing literature studied on the similar data set.