Classification of Seizure and Nonseizure EEG Signals Using Empirical Mode Decomposition

In this paper, we present a new method for classification of electroencephalogram (EEG) signals using empirical mode decomposition (EMD) method. The intrinsic mode functions (IMFs) generated by EMD method can be considered as a set of amplitude and frequency modulated (AM-FM) signals. The Hilbert transformation of IMFs provides an analytic signal representation of the IMFs. The two bandwidths, namely amplitude modulation bandwidth (B_AM) and frequency modulation bandwidth (B_FM), computed from the analytic IMFs, have been used as an input to least squares support vector machine (LS-SVM) for classifying seizure and nonseizure EEG signals. The proposed method for classification of EEG signals based on the bandwidth features (B_AM and B_FM) and the LS-SVM has provided better classification accuracy than the method adopted by Liang and coworkers in their study published in 2010. The experimental results with the recorded EEG signals from a published dataset are included to show the effectiveness of the proposed method for EEG signal classification.