Data mining an EEG dataset with an emphasis on dimensionality reduction

The human brain is obviously a complex system, and exhibits rich spatiotemporal dynamics. Among the non-invasive techniques for probing human brain dynamics, electroencephalography (EEG) provides a direct measure of cortical activity with millisecond temporal resolution. Early attempts to analyse EEG data relied on visual inspection of EEG records. Since the introduction of EEG recordings, the volume of data generated from a study involving a single patient has increased exponentially. Therefore, automation based on pattern classification techniques have been applied with considerable success. In this study, a multi-step approach for the classification of EEG signal has been adopted. We have analysed sets of EEG time series recording from healthy volunteers with open eyes and intracranial EEG recordings from patients with epilepsy during ictal (seizure) periods. In the present work, we have employed a discrete wavelet transform to the EEG data in order to extract temporal information in the form of changes in the frequency domain over time - that is they are able to extract non-stationary signals embedded in the noisy background of the human brain. Principal components analysis (PCA) and rough sets have been used to reduce the data dimensionality. A multi-classifier scheme consists of LVQ2.1 neural networks have been developed for the classification task. The experimental results validated the proposed methodology

FEATURE SELECTION APPLIED TO THE TIME-FREQUENCY REPRESENTATION OF MUSCLE NEAR-INFRARED SPECTROSCOPY (NIRS) SIGNALS: CHARACTERIZATION OF DIABETIC OXYGENATION PATTERNS

Diabetic patients might present peripheral microcirculation impairment and might benefit from physical training. Thirty-nine diabetic patients underwent the monitoring of the tibialis anterior muscle oxygenation during a series of voluntary ankle flexo-extensions by near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS). NIRS signals were acquired before and after training protocols. Sixteen control subjects were tested with the same protocol. Time-frequency distributions of the Cohen's class were used to process the NIRS signals relative to the concentration changes of oxygenated and reduced hemoglobin. A total of 24 variables were measured for each subject and the most discriminative were selected by using four feature selection algorithms: QuickReduct, Genetic Rough-Set Attribute Reduction, Ant Rough-Set Attribute Reduction, and traditional ANOVA. Artificial neural networks were used to validate the discriminative power of the selected features. Results showed that different algorithms extracted different sets of variables, but all the combinations were discriminative. The best classification accuracy was about 70%. The oxygenation variables were selected when comparing controls to diabetic patients or diabetic patients before and after training. This preliminary study showed the importance of feature selection techniques in NIRS assessment of diabetic peripheral vascular impairmen