Depression Detection with EEG Based on Mutual Information Regularization

Depression is a kind of mental illness that is harmful to the development of society. Electroencephalography (EEG) is a promising tool in the area of auxiliary diagnosing diseases. In this paper, we develop a mutual information-based least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (MI-LASSO) model to learn representative features from the power spectral density (PSD) ratio extracted from data. Specifically, MI-LASSO adds an adaptive weight based on mutual information to LASSO, which can discriminate weights of different features. Following the feature selection accomplished by MI-LASSO, the feature set is input into the classifier. We design a stacking ensemble classifier composed of support vector machine (SVM), adaptive boosting (AdaBoost), random forest (RF), and K-nearest neighbor (KNN). Compared to independent classifiers, stacking has a stronger ability to recognize depression. The proposed framework is validated on the open datasets: MODMA and the dataset from Hospital Universiti Sains Malaysia (HUSM). The best classification accuracy on MODMA achieved 99.025%. The best classification accuracy on the second dataset achieved 99.06%. The results indicate that our framework outperforms other EEG-based methods in the identification of depression. We conducted several experiments whose results demonstrate our framework can effectively assist in the diagnosis of depression based on EEG.