Improving the Interpretability Through Maximizing Mutual Information for EEG Emotion Recognition

Trustworthy Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for EEG emotion recognition should identify emotions accurately and elucidate corresponding rationales. Current GNNs have achieved notable performance by dynamically modeling emotional connections between EEG channels. However, these GNNs lack interpretability due to the absence of explicit rationale behind their predictions. This paper conducts a comprehensive identification of important EEG channels to enhance the interpretability of EEG emotion recognition from the perspective of mutual information. Specifically, an Adjacency-Explainable Graph Neural Network (AEG) for ante-hoc interpretability is proposed to capture genuine EEG emotional connections, which gives a theoretical guarantee to remove spurious connections. Moreover, a Channel-wise Adaptive Class Activation Mapping Explainer (CACA) for post-hoc interpretability is developed to locate the EEG channels that contribute most to predictions. Experimental results on three datasets, i.e., SEED, SEED-IV, and DREAMER, prove that imbuing training processes with enhanced interpretability ensures significant performance improvements in emotion recognition. Quantitative comparisons of post-hoc interpretability also demonstrate the superiority of CACA. Furthermore, this paper illustrates two potential applications of the proposed methodologies, showing their broader utility and significance.