Real-Time Epileptic Seizure Detection from Raw EEG Using Classical Machine Learning and Time-Domain Feature

Abstract

Automated detection of epileptic seizures from electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings is essential for timely clinical intervention and long-term patient monitoring. Deep learning achieves high accuracy, but its limited interpretability and computational demands restrict deployment in resource-constrained, real-time clinical environments; furthermore, classical machine learning studies have concentrated on a narrow group of well-known temporal features. This study systematically introduces and evaluates 25 less-explored time-domain features, 13 of which have no documented precedent as classification features in scalp EEG seizure detection, against 25 classical features and their 50-feature combination. Raw, unfiltered recordings from the CHB-MIT database were segmented into 10-second windows, and seven classical classifiers were optimized with GridSearchCV under subject-wise StratifiedGroupKFold cross-validation, with the data partitioned at the patient level such that no patient appeared in both the training and test sets. The multilayer perceptron trained on the combined 50-feature set performed best (accuracy 86.59%, F1-score 86.35%), exceeding the classical features alone by 5.1 and 4.6 percentage points, respectively; the less-explored features alone remained competitive (84.63%, 84.67%). SHAP analysis identified the exponent of the detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA)—a long-range, nonlinear measure of temporal correlation—as the most influential predictor. The curated feature set, its rigorous subject-level validation, and its interpretability provide a reproducible and computationally efficient foundation for future clinical deployment.