Single-Channel EEG-Based Machine Learning Method for Prescreening Major Depressive Disorder

Many studies developed the machine learning method for discriminating Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) and normal control based on multi-channel electroencephalogram (EEG) data, less concerned about using single channel EEG collected from forehead scalp to discriminate the MDD. The EEG dataset is collected by the Fp1 and Fp2 electrode of a 32-channel EEG system. The result demonstrates that the classification performance based on the EEG of Fp1 location exceeds the performance based on the EEG of Fp2 location, and shows that single-channel EEG analysis can provide discrimination of MDD at the level of multi-channel EEG analysis. Furthermore, a portable EEG device collecting the signal from Fp1 location is used to collect the second dataset. The Classification and Regression Tree combining genetic algorithm (GA) achieves the highest accuracy of 86.67% based on leave-one-participant-out cross validation, which shows that the single-channel EEG-based machine learning method is promising to support MDD prescreening application.