A Comparative Analysis of Time-frequency Feature Extraction Techniques for Large Scale Electroencephalogram Data

Recognition of human emotions is a fascinating research field that motivates many researchers to use various approaches, such as facial expression, speech or gesture of the body. Electroencephalogram (EEG) is another approach of recognizing human emotion through brain signals and has offered promising findings. Although EEG signals provide detail information on human emotional states, the analysis of non-linear and chaotic characteristics of EEG signals is a substantial problem. The main challenge remains in analyzing EEG signals to extract relevant features in order to achieve optimum classification performance. Various feature extraction methods have been developed by researchers, which mainly can be categorized under time, frequency or time-frequency based feature extraction methods. Yet, there are numerous setting that could affect the performance of any model. In this paper, we investigated the performance of Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and Discrete Wavelet Packet Transform (DWPT), which are time-frequency domain methods using Support Vector Machine (SVM) and k-Nearest Neighbor (KNN) classification techniques. Different SVM kernel functions and distance metrics of KNN are tested in this study by using subject-dependent and subject -independent approaches. The experiment is implemented using publicly available DEAP dataset. The experimental results show that DWT is mostly suitable with weighted KNN classifier while DWPT reported better results when tested using Linear SVM classifier to accurately classify the EEG signals on subject-dependent approach. Consistent results are observed for DWT-KNN on subject-independent approach, however SVM works better in the setting of quadratic kernel functions. These results indicate that further investigation is significant to examine the impact of different setting of methods in analyzing large scale of EEG data.