Automated epileptic seizure detection using improved correlation-based feature selection with random forest classifier

Analysis of electroencephalogram (EEG) signal is crucial due to its non-stationary characteristics, which could lead the way to proper detection method for the treatment of patients with neurological abnormalities, especially for epilepsy. The performance of EEG-based epileptic seizure detection relies largely on the quality of selected features from an EEG data that characterize seizure activity. This paper presents a novel analysis method for detecting epileptic seizure from EEG signal using Improved Correlation-based Feature Selection method (ICFS) with Random Forest classifier (RF). The analysis involves, first applying ICFS to select the most prominent features from the time domain, frequency domain, and entropy based features. An ensemble of Random Forest (RF) classifiers is then learned on the selected set of features. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method shows better performance compared to the conventional Correlation-based method and also outperforms some other state-of-the-art methods of epileptic seizure detection using the same benchmark EEG dataset. © 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.