A hybrid model for EEG-based gender recognition

Cogn Neurodyn. 2019 Dec;13(6):541-554. doi: 10.1007/s11571-019-09543-y. Epub 2019 Jul 4.

Abstract

The gender recognition is an important research field to study evidence regarding some personal characteristics in the information and data society. However, some current traditional methods such as vision and sound have been exposed their own security weaknesses. Recently, biometric gender recognition based on Electroencephalography (EEG) signals has been widely used in information safety and medical fields. It is necessary to explore potential of using EEG to present a more robust and accurate result with larger training data based on sophisticated machine learning approaches. In this contribution, we present an automated gender recognition system by a hybrid model based on EEG data of resting state from twenty-eight subjects. These data are useful and handy to get insights into assessing the differences in personal gender. For achieving a good performance and a strong robustness, the system develops a hybrid model of combining random forest and logistic regression, and employs four common entropy measures to analyze the non-stationary EEG signals. Result also suggests that the recognition performance achieve an improved progress with an accuracy of 0.9982 and AUC of 0.9926 based on a nested tenfold cross-validation loop, implying that show a significant potential applicability of the proposed approach and is capable of recognizing personal gender.

Keywords: Electroencephalogram (EEG); Entropy measures; Gender recognition; Logistic regression (LR); Random forest (RF).