A general sample-weighted framework for epileptic seizure prediction

Abstract

Objective:Effective epileptic seizure prediction can make the patients know the onset of the seizure in advance to take timely preventive measures. Many studies based on machine learning methods have been proposed to tackle this problem and achieve significant progress in recent years. However, most studies treat each EEG training sample’s contribution to the model as equal, while different samples have different predictive effects on epileptic seizures (e.g., preictal samples from different times). To this end, in this paper, we propose a general sample-weighted framework for patient-specific epileptic seizure prediction. Methods:Specifically, we define the mapping from the sample weights of training sets to the performance of the validation sets as the fitness function to be optimized. Then, the genetic algorithm is employed to optimize this fitness function and obtain the optimal sample weights. Finally, we obtain the final model by using the training sets with optimized sample weights. Results:To evaluate the effectiveness of our framework, we conduct extensive experiments on both traditional machine learning methods and prevalent deep learning methods. Our framework can significantly improve performance based on these methods. Among them, our framework based on Transformer achieves an average sensitivity of 94.6%, an average false prediction rate of 0.06/h, and an average AUC of 0.939 in 12 pediatric patients from the CHB-MIT database with the leave-one-out method, which outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. Conclusion:This study provides new insights into the field of epileptic seizure prediction by considering the discrepancies between EEG samples. Moreover, we develop a general sample-weighted framework, which applies to almost all classical classification methods and can significantly improve performance based on these methods.