Machine learning-based EEG analysis for enhanced schizophrenia classification and diagnosis

Abstract. Schizophrenia can have a significant impact on patients' lives, studies, and work. Patients may experience delusions, hallucinations, disorganized thinking, and abnormal behavior, among other symptoms. Therefore, research related to schizophrenia is of great importance. This paper proposes the design of a classifier based on machine learning for diagnosing schizophrenia. The classifier extracts N100 features, P300 features, and power features across different frequency bands from both time-domain and frequency-domain characteristics from Electroencephalography (EEG) signals. Given the small dataset, a Support Vector Machine (SVM) machine learning algorithm was chosen to process and classify the selected features. To address the limitations of SVM in handling high-dimensional data and nonlinear problems, this study introduces a comprehensive improvement method based on Bayesian optimization, Recursive Feature Elimination (RFE), and data augmentation. Bayesian optimization was used to find the best combination of hyperparameters for the model, thereby improving its performance; RFE was employed to assess feature importance and remove the least important features, enhancing the model's training efficiency and generalization capability. Additionally, data augmentation was included to increase the sample size and introduce diversity, thereby improving the model's robustness. The study found that these methods effectively improved classification accuracy and generalization ability.