Schizophrenia Detection from EEG Signals: A Transformer Framework with Spectrogram Representation

Abstract

Schizophrenia is a serious psychiatric disorder that affects millions of people worldwide, and its diagnosis remains primarily dependent on clinical assessment. Electroencephalography (EEG) provides a non-invasive approach to investigate brain activity and has shown potential to support automated Schizophrenia detection. However, existing EEG-based classification studies often suffer from limitations including small datasets, inconsistent preprocessing strategies, and evaluation protocols that may not adequately prevent subject-related data leakage. In this study, we propose an EEG-based Schizophrenia classification framework that transforms preprocessed EEG recordings into time-frequency representations using the Short-Time Fourier Transform. The generated spectrogram images are classified using both conventional Machine Learning algorithms, including Support Vector Machines, Random Forests, and XGBoost, and Deep Learning models, including convolutional architectures and CNN-Transformer hybrids. To ensure reliable evaluation, all data partitions are performed at the subject level, and image-level predictions are aggregated into subject-level decisions. On the independent test set of 18 subjects, the CNN-Transformer (CT-SZ) model achieves a subject-level AUC-ROC of 95.00%, while the CNN + Squeeze-and-Excitation + Transformer (CST-SZ) model achieves 92.50%.