Background and Objective: Epilepsy is one of the common diseases of the nervous system, which affects almost 1% of the world’s population. The unpredictable nature of epileptic seizures has caused people suffering from it to be deprived of their normal life, and making a device that can detect a seizure onset can help them. Methods:Game theory is a branch of mathematical science that, after proving its ability in economics, has entered into the field of signal processing and is trying to solve complex problems with a new approach. In this paper, we use game theory and coalitional game concepts to provide a novel way of feature selection in the analysis of Electroencephalography (EEG) signals. We have used a variety of statistical, morphological, and frequency features, and with the proposed feature selection algorithm we have attempted to select the smallest coalition which discriminates between two brain states while appropriately allocating resources to satisfy our desired sensitivity, delay, and false alarm. A modified change point detection algorithm has also been introduced to be used to detect epileptic seizures. Results:The results of the test on the CHB-MIT dataset show that using the proposed algorithm, we can achieve improved performance in terms of sensitivity, delay, and false alarm with a few number of features. Our framework also provides a means to focus on desired criteria for different applications. In scenario which the focus was on sensitivity, the proposed framework achieved 99% average sensitivity, 0.4/h average false alarm, and 2.4 s average delay with only using about 2 features for each patient. Conclusion:By applying the proposed framework on the CHB-MIT dataset we observe that we can achieve better performance compared to recent studies with fewer features in terms of sensitivity, delay, and false alarm metrics. Such an algorithm can be used for the purpose of real-time detection and in wearable devices.
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