Detection of alcoholic impact on visual event related potentials using beta band spectral entropy, repeated measures ANOVA and k-NN classifier

In this paper, the effect of alcohol on visual event related potentials (visual ERPs) of 61-channel electroencephalogram (EEG) is investigated using Spectral Entropy (SE) parameters in beta band (13-28Hz). The Repeated Measures Anova (RMANOVA) test is used to determine within group and between group variability of SE values in (61 channels) various specified regions of the brain during a visual single object recognition task. In order to discriminate visual ERPs produced in alcoholics and controls within the beta band, SE features are applied to a k-NN classifier. RMANOVA tests show that there is little statistical significance (p>0.05) as far as the marginal mean between groups is considered. However, the marginal mean variability within group indicates that there are some selected channels in which the statistical significance is observed (p<0.05). The classification results show that k-NN classification achieves 90.41% accuracy with k=8. It is also observed that the mean of spectral entropy values increase mainly in the left frontal region of the brain in alcoholics as compared to controls.