EEG based Classification of Long-term Stress Using Psychological Labeling

Sanay Muhammad Umar Saeed, Syed Muhammad Anwar, Humaira Khalid, Muhammad Majid, And Ulas Bagci, Sanay Muhammad Umar Saeed, Syed Muhammad Anwar, Humaira Khalid, Muhammad Majid, And Ulas Bagci

Abstract

Stress research is a rapidly emerging area in the field of electroencephalography (EEG) signal processing. The use of EEG as an objective measure for cost effective and personalized stress management becomes important in situations like the nonavailability of mental health facilities. In this study, long-term stress was classified with machine learning algorithms using resting state EEG signal recordings. The labeling for the stress and control groups was performed using two currently accepted clinical practices: (i) the perceived stress scale score and (ii) expert evaluation. The frequency domain features were extracted from five-channel EEG recordings in addition to the frontal and temporal alpha and beta asymmetries. The alpha asymmetry was computed from four channels and used as a feature. Feature selection was also performed to identify statistically significant features for both stress and control groups (via t-test). We found that support vector machine was best suited to classify long-term human stress when used with alpha asymmetry as a feature. It was observed that the expert evaluation-based labeling method had improved the classification accuracy by up to 85.20%. Based on these results, it is concluded that alpha asymmetry may be used as a potential bio-marker for stress classification, when labels are assigned using expert evaluation.

Keywords: electroencephalography; expert evaluation; long-term stress; machine learning; perceived stress scale.

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
The proposed methodology for long-term human stress classification.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Experimental sequence and the data acquisition process.
Figure 3
Figure 3
The Emotiv headset with five electrodes marked at positions AF3,AF4,T7,T8,andPz.
Figure 4
Figure 4
A graphical representation of Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) scores for participants showing labels assigned using the PSS based labeling method (green: control group, red: stress group, yellow: neutral).
Figure 5
Figure 5
Box plots of features. (a) Alpha asymmetry; (b) beta; (c) gamma; (d) alpha asymmetry (EE); (e) beta (EE); (f) gamma (EE); EE represents the labeling method of expert evaluation.

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