Automated identification of epileptic and alcoholic EEG signals using recurrence quantification analysis

Epilepsy is a common neurological disorder characterized by recurrence seizures. Alcoholism causes organic changes in the brain, resulting in seizure attacks similar to epileptic fits. Hence, it is challenging to differentiate the cause of fits as epileptic or alcoholism, which is important for deciding on the treatment in the neurology ward. The focus of this paper is to automatically differentiate epileptic, normal, and alcoholic electroencephalogram (EEG) signals. As the EEG signals are non-linear and dynamic in nature, it is difficult to tell the subtle changes in these signals with the help of linear techniques or by the naked eye. Therefore, to analyze the normal (control), epileptic, and alcoholic EEG signals, two non-linear methods, such as recurrence plots (RPs) and then recurrence quantification analysis (RQA) are adopted. Approximately 10 RQA parameters have been used to classify the EEG signals into three distinct classes, i.e., normal, epileptic, and alcoholic. Six classifiers, such as support vector machine (SVM), radial basis probabilistic neural network (RBPNN), decision tree (DT), Gaussian mixture model (GMM), k-nearest neighbor (kNN), and fuzzy Sugeno classifiers have been developed to accomplish this task. Results show that the GMM classifier outperformed the other classifiers with a classification sensitivity of 99.6%, specificity of 98.3%, and accuracy of 98.6%.