Feature selection before EEG classification supports the diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease

•We achieved EEG-based diagnostic accuracy >90% with reduced data dimensionality in Alzheimer's disease.•More than 80% of EEG features are marginal or irrelevant to support diagnosis.•Automated selected EEG features are in agreement with previous neurobiological findings.

ObjectiveIn many decision support systems, some input features can be marginal or irrelevant to the diagnosis, while others can be redundant among each other. Thus, feature selection (FS) algorithms are often considered to find relevant/non-redundant features.This study aimed to evaluate the relevance of FS approaches applied to Alzheimer's Disease (AD) EEG-based diagnosis and compare the selected features with previous clinical findings.MethodsEight different FS algorithms were applied to EEG spectral measures from 22 AD patients and 12 healthy age-matched controls. The FS contribution was evaluated by considering the leave-one-subject-out accuracy of Support Vector Machine classifiers built in the datasets described by the selected features.ResultsThe Filtered Subset Evaluator technique achieved the best performance improvement both on a per-patient basis (91.18% of accuracy) and on a per-epoch basis (85.29 ± 21.62%), after removing 88.76 ± 1.12% of the original features. All algorithms found out that alpha and beta bands are relevant features, which is in agreement with previous findings from the literature.ConclusionBiologically plausible EEG datasets could achieve improved accuracies with pre-processing FS steps.SignificanceThe results suggest that the FS and classification techniques are an attractive complementary tool in order to reveal potential biomarkers aiding the AD clinical diagnosis.