CubicPat: Investigations on the Mental Performance and Stress Detection Using EEG Signals

<b>Background\Objectives:</b> Solving the secrets of the brain is a significant challenge for researchers. This work aims to contribute to this area by presenting a new explainable feature engineering (XFE) architecture designed to obtain explainable results related to stress and mental performance using electroencephalography (EEG) signals. <b>Materials and Methods:</b> Two EEG datasets were collected to detect mental performance and stress. To achieve classification and explainable results, a new XFE model was developed, incorporating a novel feature extraction function called Cubic Pattern (CubicPat), which generates a three-dimensional feature vector by coding channels. Classification results were obtained using the cumulative weighted iterative neighborhood component analysis (CWINCA) feature selector and the t-algorithm-based k-nearest neighbors (tkNN) classifier. Additionally, explainable results were generated using the CWINCA selector and Directed Lobish (DLob). <b>Results:</b> The CubicPat-based model demonstrated both classification and interpretability. Using 10-fold cross-validation (CV) and leave-one-subject-out (LOSO) CV, the introduced CubicPat-driven model achieved over 95% and 75% classification accuracies, respectively, for both datasets. <b>Conclusions:</b> The interpretable results were obtained by deploying DLob and statistical analysis.