Epilepsy Diagnosis Analysis via a Multiple-Measures Composite Strategy from the Viewpoint of Associated Network Analysis Methods

Based on some typical complex network analysis methods and machine learning techniques, a general multiple-measures composited strategy-guided epilepsy diagnosis analysis framework is proposed in this brief paper. Five typical network analysis methods for biology time series analysis are utilized for real applications, including the classical visibility graph (VG), horizontal visibility graph (HVG), the limited penetrable visibility graph (LPVG), the modified frequency degree method (MFDM), and the quantity graph (QG). By using the aforementioned typical transformation methods, the EEG signal sets to be classified are transferred into graph network object sets. The main network features and related indicators are calculated and extracted as features for classification tasks. Some key features are selected via variance analysis, and the eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBOOST) machine learning algorithm is used for related binary and five-class classification tasks for electroencephalographic time series. Numerical experiments demonstrate that, through ten-fold cross-validation on the entire dataset, the classification accuracy for two-class classification consistently reaches 97.8% (with a specificity of 97.5%), while for five-class classification, the accuracy stably reaches 82.4% (with a specificity of 95.6%). Therefore, our classification framework can be effectively used to assist hospital doctors and medical specialists in diagnosing related diseases, especially to help accelerate the treatment of epilepsy patients.