On effective cognitive state classification using novel feature extraction strategies

Cogn Neurodyn. 2021 Dec;15(6):1125-1155. doi: 10.1007/s11571-021-09688-9. Epub 2021 Jun 22.

Abstract

Investigating new features for human cognitive state classification is an intiguing area of research with Electroencephalography (EEG) based signal analysis. We plan to develop a cost-effective system for cognitive state classification using ambulatory EEG signals. A novel event driven environment is created using external stimuli for capturing EEG data using a 14-channel Emotiv neuro-headset. A new feature extraction method, Gammatone Cepstrum Coefficients (GTCC) is introduced for ambulatory EEG signal analysis. The efficacy of this technique is compared with other feature extraction methods such as Discrete Wavelet Transformation (DWT) and Mel-Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) using statistical metrics such as Fisher Discriminant Ratio (FDR) and Logistic Regression (LR). We obtain higher values for GTCC features, demonstrating its discriminative power during classification. A superior performance is achieved for the EEG dataset with a novel ensemble feature space comprising of GTCC and MFCC. Furthermore, the ensemble feature sets are passed through a proposed 1D Convolution Neural Networks (CNN) model to extract novel features. Various classification models like Probabilistic neural network (P-NN), Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), Multi-Class Support Vector Machine (MCSVM), Decision Tree (DT), Random Forest (RF) and Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Network (DCGAN) are employed to observe best accuracy on extracted features. The proposed GTCC, (GTCC+MFCC) & (GTCC +MFCC +CNN) features outperform the state-of-the-art techniques for all cases in our work. With GTCC+MFCC feature space and GTCC+MFCC+CNN features, accuracies of 96.42% and 96.14% are attained with the DCGAN classifier. Higher classification accuracies of the proposed system makes it a cynosure in the field of cognitive science.

Keywords: Discrete wavelet transformation (DWT); EEG (Electroencephalogram); Fisher discriminant ratio (FDR); Gammatone cepstrum coefficient (GTCC); Probabilistic neural network (P-NN).