Prediction of Epileptic Seizures using Support Vector Machine and Regularization

Epilepsy is a neurological disorder that causes abnormal behavior and recurrent seizures due to unusual brain activity. This study has attempted to predict seizures in epileptic patients through the process of feature extraction from EEG signals during preictal/ictal and interictal periods, classification and regularization. EEG signals from various parts of the brain from 10 epileptic patients are considered. Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) is used to determine the three features-the phase angle, the amplitude and the power spectral density of the signals. To classify the signals, these features are then used along with Support Vector Machine (SVM) as the classifier. Furthermore, regularization is used to make better predictions i.e. increase prediction accuracy and decrease the rate of false alarm. Finally, the proposed approach is tested on CHB-MIT Scalp EEG data set and it is able to predict epileptic seizures 25 minutes on average before the onset of the seizure with 100% accuracy and a low false-alarm rate of 0.46 per hour. This study intends to contribute to the development of better and advanced seizure predicting devices in the medical field.