Weighted Visibility Graph With Complex Network Features in the Detection of Epilepsy

Abstract

Epilepsy detection from electrical characteristics of EEG signals obtained from the brain of undergone subject is a challenge task for both research and neurologist due to the non-stationary and chaotic nature of EEG signals. As epileptic EEG signals contain huge fluctuating information about the functional behavior of the brain, it is hard to distinguish the fundamental dynamic, complex network of EEG signals without considering the strength among the nodes as they are connected with each other on the basis of these strengths. The prior research on natural visibility graph did not consider this issue in epileptic seizure, although it is a very important key point to have representative information from the signals. Hence, this paper aims to introduce a new idea for epilepsy detection using complex network statistical properties by measuring different strengths of the edges in natural visibility graph theory, which is considered as weight. Thus, the proposed method is named “weighted visibility graph”. In this proposed method, first, the epileptic EEG signals are transformed into complex network and then two important statistical properties of a network such as modularity and average weighted degree used for extracting the imperative characteristics from a network of EEG signals. After that, the extracted features are evaluated by two modern machine-learning classifiers such as, support vector machine with a different kernel function and k-nearest neighbor. The experimental results demonstrate that the combined effect of both features is valuable for network metrics to characterize the EEG time series signals in case of weighted complex network generating up to 100% classification accuracy.