Recognition of Emotional States Using Multiscale Information Analysis of High Frequency EEG Oscillations

Exploring the manifestation of emotion in electroencephalogram (EEG) signals is helpful for improving the accuracy of emotion recognition. This paper introduced the novel features based on the multiscale information analysis (MIA) of EEG signals for distinguishing emotional states in four dimensions based on Russell’s circumplex model. The algorithms were applied to extract features on the DEAP database, which included multiscale EEG complexity index in the time domain, and ensemble empirical mode decomposition enhanced energy and fuzzy entropy in the frequency domain. The support vector machine and cross validation method were applied to assess classification accuracy. The classification performance of MIA methods (accuracy = 62.01%, precision = 62.03%, recall/sensitivity = 60.51%, and specificity = 82.80%) was much higher than classical methods (accuracy = 43.98%, precision = 43.81%, recall/sensitivity = 41.86%, and specificity = 70.50%), which extracted features contain similar energy based on a discrete wavelet transform, fractal dimension, and sample entropy. In this study, we found that emotion recognition is more associated with high frequency oscillations (51–100Hz) of EEG signals rather than low frequency oscillations (0.3–49Hz), and the significance of the frontal and temporal regions are higher than other regions. Such information has predictive power and may provide more insights into analyzing the multiscale information of high frequency oscillations in EEG signals.