Transductive Joint-Knowledge-Transfer TSK FS for Recognition of Epileptic EEG Signals

Intelligent recognition of electroencephalogram (EEG) signals is an important means to detect seizure. Traditional methods for recognizing epileptic EEG signals are usually based on two assumptions: 1) adequate training examples are available for model training and 2) the training set and the test set are sampled from data sets with the same distribution. Since seizures occur sporadically, training examples of seizures could be limited. Besides, the training and test sets are usually not sampled from the same distribution for generic non-patient-specific recognition of EEG signals. Hence, the two assumptions in traditional recognition methods could hardly be satisfied in practice, which results in degradation of model performance. Transfer learning is a feasible approach to tackle this issue attributed to its ability to effectively learn the knowledge from the related scenes (source domains) for model training in the current scene (target domain). Among the existing transfer learning methods for epileptic EEG recognition, transductive transfer learning fuzzy systems (TTL-FSs) exhibit distinctive advantages - the interpretability that is important for medical diagnosis and the transfer learning ability that is absent from traditional fuzzy systems. Nevertheless, the transfer learning ability of TTL-FSs is restricted to a certain extent since only the discrepancy in marginal distribution between the training data and test data is considered. In this paper, the enhanced transductive transfer learning Takagi-Sugeno-Kang fuzzy system construction method is proposed to overcome the challenge by introducing two novel transfer learning mechanisms: 1) joint knowledge is adopted to reduce the discrepancy between the two domains and 2) an iterative transfer learning procedure is introduced to enhance transfer learning ability. Extensive experiments have been carried out to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method in recognizing epileptic EEG signals on the Bonn and CHB-MIT EEG data sets. The results show that the method is superior to or at least competitive with some of the existing state-of-art methods under the scenario of transfer learning.