Statistical feature-based EEG signals classification using ANN and SVM classifiers for Parkinson’s disease detection

Abstract

Parkinson's disease (PD) is a neurological disorder which is progressive in nature. Although there is no cure to this disease, symptomatic treatments are available. These treatments can slow the progressive development of the symptoms. Medications can treat some of the symptoms of the PD up to a great extent that in turn may help the patients to live a normal life. Besides these medications, the patients can also be provided with various therapies based on the types of their symptoms. But for providing any treatment, detection of its symptoms at an early stage is very important. This can reduce its future complexities considerably. Early diagnosis along with proper medications may treat the symptoms of PD significantly. This motivates to propose a new and effective methodology for detection and analysis of PD. In this work, an approach has been proposed for identification of PD patients by using Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals. Here, the EEG signals of normal persons and PD patients are processed in three stages. First, the raw EEG signals are pre-processed for removal of noises and artefacts present. Out of various techniques, Wavelet transform is used for this purpose. In the MATLAB environment, de-noising can be executed by using the in-built functions. Performances of the de-noising techniques are examined with the performance parameters namely Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) as well as Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR). In the second stage, statistical features are extracted from the pre-processed EEG signals. In this work, five statistical features are considered for performing the classification. In the final stage, the extracted features are classified using Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) techniques. ANN is an efficient classifier that predicts the human brain's working manners. SVM on the other hand has been proven as one of the most prevailing classification algorithms that gives highly accurate and robust results. This is a novel approach of analyzing the performances of the classification techniques by evaluating the best performing feature. In both the classifiers accuracy, precision, sensitivity and specificity are calculated from the confusion matrix evaluated from the values of the statistical features. In ANN, results using six different training algorithms at different hidden layers are calculated and compared. This proves the training algorithm Levenberg-Marquardt back-propagation with hidden layer 20 as the best combination for performing the classification. From the results it is seen that both ANN and SVM classifiers provide significant classification accuracies of 94.7% and 96.5% respectively. Amongst the five considered features, Mean performs the best in terms of classification accuracy.