Nonlinear and chaos features over EMD/VMD decomposition methods for ictal EEG signals detection

The detection and identification of epileptic seizures attracted considerable relevance for the neurophysiologists. In order to accomplish the detection of epileptic seizures or equivalently ictal EEG states, this paper proposes the use of nonlinear and chaos features not computed over the raw EEG signals as it was commonly experienced, but instead over intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) extracted subsequently to the application of newly time-frequency signal decomposition methods on the basis of empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and variational mode decomposition (VMD) methods. The first step within the proposed methodology is to excerpt the various components of the IMFs by EMD and VMD decomposition methods on time EEG segments. The Hjorth parameters, the Hurst exponent, the Recurrence Quantification Analysis (RQA), the detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA), the Largest Lyapunov Exponent (LLE), The Higuchi and Katz fractal dimensions (HFD and KFD), seven nonlinear and chaos features computed over the IMFs were investigated and their classification performances evaluated using the k-nearest neighbor (KNN) and the multilayer perceptron neural network (MLPNN) classifiers. Furthermore, the combination of the best nonlinear features has also been examined in terms of sensitivity, specificity and overall classification accuracy. The publicly available Bonn EEG dataset has been has been employed to validate the efficiency of the proposed method for detecting ictal EEG signals from normal or interictal EEG segments. Among the several experiments involved in the current study, the ultimate results establish that the overall classification accuracy can achieve 100%, 99.45%, 99.8%, 99.8%, 98.6% and 99.1% for six different epileptic seizure detection case problems studied, confirming the ability of the proposed methodology in helping the clinic practitioners in the epilepsy detection care units to classify seizure events with a great confidence.