Explainable Depression Classification Based on EEG Feature Selection From Audio Stimuli

With the development of affective computing and Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies, Electroencephalogram (EEG)-based depression detection methods have been widely proposed. However, existing studies have mostly focused on the accuracy of depression recognition, ignoring the association between features and models. Additionally, there is a lack of research on the contribution of different features to depression recognition. To this end, this study introduces an innovative approach to depression detection using EEG data, integrating Ant-Lion Optimization (ALO) and Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) for feature fusion analysis. The inclusion of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) methods enhances the explainability of the model’s features. The Time-Delay Embedded Hidden Markov Model (TDE-HMM) is employed to infer internal brain states during depression, triggered by audio stimulation. The ALO-MARL algorithm, combined with hyper-parameter optimization of the XGBoost classifier, achieves high accuracy (93.69%), sensitivity (88.60%), specificity (97.08%), and F1-score (91.82%) on a auditory stimulus-evoked three-channel EEG dataset. The results suggest that this approach outperforms state-of-the-art feature selection methods for depression recognition on this dataset, and XAI elucidates the critical impact of the minimum value of Power Spectral Density (PSD), Sample Entropy (SampEn), and Rényi Entropy (Ren) on depression recognition. The study also explores dynamic brain state transitions revealed by audio stimuli, providing insights for the clinical application of AI algorithms in depression recognition.