Epileptic Seizure Detection Based on Variational Mode Decomposition and Deep Forest Using EEG Signals

Electroencephalography (EEG) records the electrical activity of the brain, which is an important tool for the automatic detection of epileptic seizures. It is certainly a very heavy burden to only recognize EEG epilepsy manually, so the method of computer-assisted treatment is of great importance. This paper presents a seizure detection algorithm based on variational modal decomposition (VMD) and a deep forest (DF) model. Variational modal decomposition is performed on EEG recordings, and the first three variational modal functions (VMFs) are selected to construct the time–frequency distribution of the EEG signals. Then, the log−Euclidean covariance matrix (LECM) is computed to represent the EEG properties and form EEG features. The deep forest model is applied to complete the EEG signal classification, which is a non-neural network deep model with a cascade structure that performs feature learning through the forest. In addition, to improve the classification accuracy, postprocessing techniques are performed to generate the discriminant results by moving average filtering and adaptive collar expansion. The algorithm was evaluated on the Bonn EEG dataset and the Freiburg long−term EEG dataset, and the former achieved a sensitivity and specificity of 99.32% and 99.31%, respectively. The mean sensitivity and specificity of this method for the 21 patients in the Freiburg dataset were 95.2% and 98.56%, respectively, with a false detection rate of 0.36/h. These results demonstrate the superior performance advantage of our algorithm and indicate its great research potential in epilepsy detection.