DEP-TFDualNet: A Dual-Domain Attention Framework with Temporal–Frequency Fusion for Depression Recognition Using Three-Channel Frontal EEG

Early depression screening is important for timely intervention, and electroencephalography (EEG) offers an objective and potentially portable sensing modality for computer-aided assessment. However, recognition from fixed three-channel frontal EEG remains difficult because of limited spatial information and incomplete modeling of temporal–frequency characteristics and temporal dependencies. This study proposes DEP-TFDualNet for acquisition-constrained frontal resting-state EEG. The framework integrates multi-scale convolution, dual-domain channel attention, temporal modeling derived from the independent recurrent neural network (IndRNN) architecture, and decision-stage fusion of deep representations with low-order statistical descriptors through a Kolmogorov–Arnold Network (KAN)-based nonlinear projection layer. Experiments were conducted on the publicly available three-channel frontal EEG subset of the MODMA dataset. After additional quality control, 48 subjects were retained (22 patients with major depressive disorder, 26 healthy controls). Under subject-wise stratified five-fold cross-validation, DEP-TFDualNet achieved 85.42% accuracy, 85.26% macro-F1, 81.82% sensitivity, 88.46% specificity, an AUC of 0.82, and a Brier score of 0.121. It achieved the best threshold-based subject-level performance and the lowest Brier score among the evaluated models. These results provide preliminary evidence that simplified frontal EEG sensing may support depression recognition in acquisition-constrained settings, although larger and external validation is still required.