Epilepsy is a neurological disorder in the activity of brain cells that leads to seizures. An electroencephalogram (EEG) can detect seizures as it contains physiological information of the neural activity of the brain. However, visual examination of EEG by experts is time consuming, and their diagnoses may even contradict each other. Thus, an automated computer-aided diagnosis for EEG diagnostics is necessary. Therefore, this paper proposes an effective approach for the early detection of epilepsy. The proposed approach involves the extraction of important features and classification. First, signal components are decomposed to extract the features via the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) method. Principal component analysis (PCA) and the t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE) algorithm were applied to reduce the dimensions and focus on the most important features. Subsequently, K-means clustering + PCA and K-means clustering + t-SNE were used to divide the dataset into subgroups to reduce the dimensions and focus on the most important representative features of epilepsy. The features extracted from these steps were fed to extreme gradient boosting, K-nearest neighbors (K-NN), decision tree (DT), random forest (RF) and multilayer perceptron (MLP) classifiers. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed approach provides superior results to those of existing studies. During the testing phase, the RF classifier with DWT and PCA achieved an accuracy of 97.96%, precision of 99.1%, recall of 94.41% and F1 score of 97.41%. Moreover, the RF classifier with DWT and t-SNE attained an accuracy of 98.09%, precision of 99.1%, recall of 93.9% and F1 score of 96.21%. In comparison, the MLP classifier with PCA + K-means reached an accuracy of 98.98%, precision of 99.16%, recall of 95.69% and F1 score of 97.4%.
Keywords: DWT; EEG; K-means; PCA; epileptic seizure; machine learning; t-SNE.