Support vector machine with theta-beta band power features generated from writing of dyslexic children

• Published in: International Journal of Integrated Engineering
• Main Author: Mahmoodin Z.; Lee K.Y.; Mansor W.; Zainuddin A.Z.A.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Penerbit UTHM 2019
• Online Access: https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85075880383&doi=10.30880%2fijie.2019.11.03.005&partnerID=40&md5=d3e80edae76546f5c4a7bce69c9e5e7e

The classification of dyslexia using EEG requires the detection of subtle differences between groups of children in an environment that are known to be noisy and full of artifacts. It is thus necessary for the feature extraction to improve the classification. The normal and poor dyslexic are found to activate similar areas on the left hemisphere during reading and writing. With only a single feature vector of beta activation, it is difficult to distinguish the difference between the two groups. Our work here aims to examine the classification performance of normal, poor and capable dyslexic with theta-beta band power ratio as an alternative feature vector. EEG signals were recorded from 33 subjects (11 normal, 11 poor and 11 capable dyslexics) during tasks of reading and writing words and non-words. 8 electrode locations (C3, C4, FC5, FC6, P3, P4, T7, T8) on the learning pathway and hypothesized compensatory pathway in capable dyslexic were applied. Theta and beta band power features were extracted using Daubechies, Symlets and Coiflets mother wavelet function with different orders. These are then served as inputs to linear and RBF kernel SVM classifier, where performance is measured by Area Under Curve (AUC) of Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) graph. Result shows the highest average AUC is 0.8668 for linear SVM with features extracted from Symlets of order 2, while 0.9838 for RBF kernel SVM with features extracted from Daubechies of order 6. From boxplot, the normal subjects are found to have a lower theta-beta ratio of 2.5:1, as compared to that of poor and capable dyslexic, ranging between 3 to 5, for all the electrodes. © Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia Publisher's Office.