2nd Reading

June 5, 2020 17:16 2050031

International Journal of Neural Systems (2020) 2050031 (16 pages)

c World Scientific Publishing Company
DOI: 10.1142/S0129065720500318

Deep Support Vector Machines for the Identification of Stress

Condition from Electrodermal Activity
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Roberto Sánchez-Reolid∗,† , Arturo Martı́nez-Rodrigo‡,§ , Marı́a T. López∗,†

and Antonio Fernández-Caballero∗,†,¶,
∗
Departamento de Sistemas Informáticos
Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, 02071 Albacete Spain
†
Instituto de Investigación en Informática de Albacete
02071 Albacete, Spain
‡
Departamento de Sistemas Informáticos
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Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha, 16071 Cuenca, Spain

§
Instituto de Tecnologı́as Audiovisuales, 16071 Cuenca, Spain
¶
CIBERSAM (Biomedical Research Networking
Centre in Mental Health), Spain

Antonio.Fdez@uclm.es
Accepted 18 March 2020
Published Online 5 June 2020

Early detection of stress condition is beneficial to prevent long-term mental illness like depression and
anxiety. This paper introduces an accurate identification of stress/calm condition from electrodermal
activity (EDA) signals. The acquisition of EDA signals from a commercial wearable as well as their storage
and processing are presented. Several time-domain, frequency-domain and morphological features are
extracted over the skin conductance response of the EDA signals. Afterwards, a classification is undergone
by using several classical support vector machines (SVMs) and deep support vector machines (D-SVMs).
In addition, several binary classifiers are also compared with SVMs in the stress/calm identification task.
Moreover, a series of video clips evoking calm and stress conditions have been viewed by 147 volunteers
in order to validate the classification results. The highest F1-score obtained for SVMs and D-SVMs are
83% and 92%, respectively. These results demonstrate that not only classical SVMs are appropriate for
classification of biomarker signals, but D-SVMs are very competitive in comparison to other classification
techniques. In addition, the results have enabled drawing useful considerations for the future use of SVMs
and D-SVMs in the specific case of stress/calm identification.

Keywords: Electrodermal activity; support vector machines; deep support vector machines; calm; stress.

1. Introduction scenarios are necessarily harmful to the individual,

Stress may be defined as a set of changes that occur
in the body as a physical response to repeated stim-
uli.1 These stimuli, also denominated stressors, can
report all the external factors or situations that trig-
ger stress. It has been corroborated that not all stress
since it is likely that a situation or condition that
may be stressful for one subject does not have the
same effect on another.2,3
Eustress can be considered a positive cognitive
response to stress situation, as it enables us to be


Corresponding author.

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R. Sánchez-Reolid et al.
creative, take the lead and effectively respond to
those issues that require it. On the other hand, dis-
tress, or negative stress, uses to cause a state of men-
tal fatigue that often lead to a variety of physical
and mental disorders.4,5 Therefore, the development
of early stress detection techniques seem necessary
to prevent health problems related to distress.6–8
Nowadays, there is a great demand to develop
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and adapt new technologies to monitor and detect
negative stress situations in daily life.9 Precisely, the
Affective Computing field arises with this aim.10–12
It is a new area of computing research that is
described as “computing which relates to, arises
from, or deliberately influences emotions”.10 In this
sense, our research explores how to detect and eval-
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uate the emotional state identified as stress condi-
tion. This type of studies usually analyze various
physiological signals that can be measured with non-
invasive and nonintrusive devices complemented by
machine learning techniques.6,13,14 This approach is
widely used in areas such as neurology to detect pat-
terns of epilepsy attack, hallucinations, mental dis-
tress, Alzheimer and health wellness.15–18
Preliminary works have already demonstrated
the feasibility of detecting stress from physiological
measurements11,19,20 by analyzing the response of
the peripheral nervous system.12,21–24 In this respect,
recent advances in microelectronics allow the use of
noninvasive, nonintrusive wearable devices for con-
tinuous monitoring of these physiological variables.
These wearables are well valued as they are com-
fortable, lightweight, provide long battery life and
allow wireless communication, and acquiring the sig-
nals that will be analyzed later on.6,19,25
As in previous studies characterizing changes in
emotional experiences,4,26–28 this work uses one of
the most common physiological variables to deter-
mine the activation level, namely the electrodermal
activity (EDA). EDA is a biomarker to quantify
changes in the sympathetic nervous system by mea-
suring the conductivity of the skin.20,27,29,30 These
are caused by a change of activity in the sweat glands
as a consequence of stimuli produced in the periph-
eral nervous system.6,29,31
Hence, this paper describes the use of support
vector machines (SVMs) and deep support vector
machines (D-SVMs) for the classification of both
conditions. SVMs are powerful classifiers character-
ized by handling a great number of features with
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lower computational cost. Moreover, the SVM mod-
els already known can be included within the more
modern approach of the D-SVMs.32–34 Our inten-
tion is to reuse our previous approaches in detecting
stress condition through SVMs22,23,35 and to imple-
ment D-SVMs and other binary classifiers36,37 for
the sake of comparing the methods in this applica-
tion area. In addition, an objective of this paper is
to determine whether D-SVMs improve SVM-based
models in discerning between calm and stress despite
their increase in complexity and computational cost.
The remainder of this paper is structured as fol-
lows. Section 2 introduces a description of all materi-
als and methods used to identify stress through EDA
acquired from a commercial wearable. This section
details the dataset obtained to carry out an experi-
ment and how to process the data and obtain impor-
tant features. It also introduces the architectures and
configurations of the SVMs and D-SVMs employed.
Afterwards, the results obtained for each of the tests
carried out are shown in Sec. 3. Finally, a discussion
is provided on the research in Sec. 4, ending up with
the most relevant conclusions in Sec. 5.
2. Materials and Methods
2.1. Materials
2.1.1. Acquisition device
An important piece of this work consists in the acqui-
sition, processing and procurement of a dataset to
be used for accurate identification of the stress level.
The Empatica E4 wristband38 is a wearable designed
to measure and collect physiological signals like tem-
perature, EDA, blood volume pressure and accelera-
tion. This commercial device is used in clinical exper-
iments and domestic environments for a continuous
monitoring of physiological variables. The Empatica
E4 must be securely attached to the wrist so that
the electrodes correctly touch the skin. Otherwise,
when the device is not properly connected, it does
not sample well and the captured data are not valid.
This paper has used EDA signals for the purpose
of designing and comparing classical and D-SVMs
for the identification of the stress condition. The
EDA signals are obtained by measuring the poten-
tial when a small constant current is applied between
two electrodes located on the Empatica E4 wearable
across two metallic electrodes (chromium-silver elec-
trodes). Generally, the skin reacts under stress by

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producing an increase of sweat. As a consequence,
the conductivity of the skin grows. On the other
hand, sweat production stops and skin conductiv-
ity decreases when subjected to a neutral or calm
stimulus.
2.1.2. Dataset
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The dataset was collected as described in our previ-
ous experiments.12,26,35,39 A series of video clips were
shown to the participants to elicit calm and stress
conditions. The dataset contained scenes of movie
films that emphasized a particular emotional state.
For instance, there were scenes provoking fear (high
activation), and therefore increasing stress, or tran-
quillity (low activation) promoting the state of calm.
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The scenes were shown randomly, and between clip
and clip a distracting task was launched to eliminate
the effect of the emotion previously evoked. Each clip
had a duration of 47 s and the sampling frequency
for the EDA signals was 4 Hz. While the participant
received these stimuli, their physiological variables
were acquired and saved.
A total of 147 people were recruited for exper-
imentation 68.4% of the participants were women
aged 31.4 (8.03) and 31.6% were men aged 36.3
(4.99). The participants were all volunteers and were
not rewarded for performing the experiment. The
participants signed an agreement form that inform-
ing them of the risks associated to carrying out the
experiment. The participant could stop the exper-
iment at any time if they felt uncomfortable. The
experiment was designed following the Helsinki Dec-
laration and it was approved by the Ethical Commit-
tee in Clinical Research at Universidad de Castilla-
La Mancha according to the European and Spanish
legislation.2,39
The experiment was conducted in a controlled
environment. The experiment room was equipped
with a comfortable seat and all video clips were
displayed on a 27” monitor. Before starting the
experiment, the wearable that monitored the phys-
iological variables was placed on the participant.
Then, the participant was left alone to perform the
experiment.40
2.1.3. Performance metrics
In this binary classification problem, it has been
decided to use a training method that establishes
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D-SVMs for the Identification of Stress Condition from EDA
comparisons between two classes. Several metrics
were used to calculate the performance of the mod-
els. Let us highlight that it is mandatory to evaluate
if the models work in accordance with their design.
Once the prediction was made on each type
of classifier, four different types of answers were
obtained: true positive (TP), false positive (FP), true
negative (TN) and false negative (FN). TP and TN
are used to say that an element of a set has been
classified corresponding to its category. On the other
hand, we can define FP and FN when an element
belongs to a different class than it was classified.6,41
The metrics used to evaluate the model are the fol-
lowing ones:
• The precision (P ) tells about the success probabil-
ity of making a correct positive classification. It is
computed as number of true positives divided by
the total number of positive cases.
TP
P = . (1)
TP + FP
• The recall (R) is defined as the percentage of posi-
tive cases caught. Recall explains how sensitive the
model is toward identifying the positive class. It is
computed as the number of true positives divided
by the sum of true positives and false negatives.
TP
R= . (2)
TP + FN
• The F1-score, also called F -measure, is a measure
of a test’s accuracy. It is defined as the harmonic
mean between precision and recall. It is used as a
statistical measure to rate performance.
2×P ×R
F1-score = × 100. (3)
P +R
F1-score was used as the basement for robustly
estimating the performance of the implemented
models.
2.2. Methods
2.2.1. Electrodermal activity processing
Once the signals had been obtained, a signal pro-
cessing process was performed to calculate the fun-
damental features of the EDA signals. The data typ-
ically underwent several processing steps. The EDA
signals had to be filtered in order to eliminate arte-
facts and noise recorded during the acquisition. For
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R. Sánchez-Reolid et al.
this sake, a low-pass filter with a 4 Hz cut-off fre-
quency (finite impulse response filter) and a Gaus-
sian filter to smooth the signal were implemented to
attenuate artefacts and noise. These steps were per-
formed using LEDALAB,30 an open source Matlab
software for analysis of skin conductance data.
The EDA levels were not the same for all partic-
ipants, mainly due to demographic information (e.g.
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age, race, gender). Therefore, in order to compare the
signals with each others, a deconvolution process was
carried out.29 As shown in Eqs. (4)–(6) the skin con-
ductance (SC) or EDA has two components, one is
the skin conductance level, commonly referred to as
tonic signal, and the other component is called skin
conductance response (SCR), also known as phasic
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signal.
SC = SCL + SCR
= SCtonic + SCphasic , (4)
SC = SCtonic + Driverphasic ∗ IRF, (5)
SC = (Drivetonic + Driverphasic ) ∗ IRF, (6)
where ∗ is the convolution operation and IRF is the
impulse response function.
The convolution of SC data results in a conduc-
tive function that encompasses a tonic fraction, as
shown in Eq. (5). If one of them can be estimated,
the other is obtained implicitly. The tonic can be
observed in absence of phasic activity and the pha-
sic driver is obtained by subtracting the tonic driver
from SC.29
SC
= DriverSC , (7)
IRF
DriverSC = Drivertonic + Driverphasic , (8)
SC
Driverphasic = − Drivertonic . (9)
IRF
The SCR is considered to be the effective signal
for establishing an individual’s response to a stim-
ulus.42 Once the deconvolution process was com-
pleted, the SCR signals were ready for comparison
among all the participants.
2.2.2. Feature extraction
Different features were selected in order to quan-
tify the SCR signals (see Table 1). As shown in the
table, several time-domain, frequency-domain and
morphological metrics were computed on the SCR
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Table 1. Features obtained from phasic sig-
nals (SCR).
Analysis Features
Temporal M, SD, MA, MI, DR, D1,
D2, FM, FD, SM, SSD
Morphological AL, IN, AP, RM, IL, EL
Statistical SK, KU, MO
Frequency F1, F2, F3
component. In first place, the temporal parameters
are the mean value (M), standard deviation (SD),
maximum peak value (MA), minimum peak value
(MI) and dynamic range (DR), which is the differ-
ence between the maximum and minimum values.
The first and second derivative (D1 and D2) were
also computed to see the tendencies in skin conduc-
tivity, in addition to their means (FM and FD), and
their standard deviations (SM and SSD).23
Besides, several morphological features were cho-
sen: arc length (AL), integral area (IN), normalized
mean power (AP), perimeter and area ratio (IL),
energy and perimeter ratio (EL), and, finally, three
statistic parameters, skewness (SK), kurtosis (KU)
and momentum (MO). Lastly, in relation to the fre-
quency, the fast Fourier transform (FFT) through
bandwidths F1 (0.1, 0.2), F2 (0.2, 0.3) and F3 (0.3,
0.4) was calculated.23,28
2.2.3. Dataset processing for stress detection
As explained above, the signals for each calm/stress
state have a length of 47 s. The first 4 s and the last
3 s were eliminated to avoid possible artefacts due to
the connection and others unwanted effects.
Next, two different studies were performed on
the same dataset. Prior to launching stress detec-
tion, the first study consisted in dividing each of the
SCR files into segments of different time intervals
(splits between 1 and 40 s) from the beginning of
the file (start of the stimulus), where no overlaps
between the intervals were applied (see Fig. 1(a)). In
the second study, overlapping was enabled between
the adjacent time intervals (see Fig. 1(b)). In this
case, for a split of n seconds, n − 1 seconds back will
be taken. For example, if we work with 5-s segments,
we take the first and the previous 4 s.
Two objectives were covered by using over-
lapping. The first objective was to obtain more

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(a)
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(b)
Fig. 1. Configuration of the dataset for each of the tests.
Study (a) shows a separation in n seconds without over-
lapping. Study (b) shows a separation in n seconds with
overlapping.
information (more classification features), so that the
model would get more robust during the training
phase, and there arise fewer errors during classifi-
cation. The second aim was to minimize the effects
due to arbitrariness in the choice of the time seg-
ments. This was repeated for each participant and
signal obtained.
Before that, as previously mentioned, filtering
and deconvolution processes were performed for each
SC signal. Again, this eliminates artefacts and noise
before obtaining the searched features (see Table 1).
Below, the algorithm used to generate the features
dataset is shown (see Algorithm 1). Once this pro-
cess was done, we had a dataset with all the fea-
tures for all the splits (split from 1 to 40 s). This
generated dataset was employed to feed each of
the classification models (used for training, test and
validation).
2.2.4. Other binary classifiers
Although our major interest was in an in-depth com-
parison on the performance of classical versus deep
SVMs for stress detection, we were also interested
in a comparison of D-SVMs with other binary clas-
sifiers. These binary classifiers were separated into
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D-SVMs for the Identification of Stress Condition from EDA
Algorithm 1: Feature dataset generation.
Data: Participants’ EDA file
Result: Data set with the calculated features
with/without overlapping
Initialization;
for 1 to 147 EDA files do
Remove first 4 and last 3 s;
Save Dataset;
if want overlapping then
Select overlapping window (1 S by default);
for 1 to 147 EDA files do
for 1 to 40 s do
Split file every n overlapped
seconds;
Calculate Features;
Add Features to overlapping file for
each split;
else
for 1 to 147 EDA files do
for 1 to 40 s do
Split file every n seconds;
Calculate Features;
Add Features to file for each split;
Save each different split feature file;
End;
six groups: decision trees, logistic regression, ensem-
ble trees, linear discriminant, naı̈ve Bayes and near-
est neighbors (KNN). The “Classification Learner”,
an app belonging to the Statistics and Machine
Learning Toolbox by Matlab, was used for training
these binary classifiers.43
Different configuration parameters were selected.
For decision trees, three different configurations were
analyzed: fine with 100, medium with 20 and coarse
with 4 splits, respectively. Logistic regression uses a
standard configuration. For ensemble trees we have
selected four types: boosted, bagged, RUS boosted
and subspace KNN with AdaBoost, bag, KNN and
RUS boost as ensemble methods, correspondingly.
For the linear discriminant classifier we also used a
standard configuration. For naı̈ve Bayes we used two
distributions for numeric predictors: Gaussian and
Bayesian. For KNN we used five different configu-
rations: fine, medium and coarse, using Euclidean
distance and 1, 10, 100 neighbors; cosine with 10
neighbors, using angular distance and similarity;
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R. Sánchez-Reolid et al.
weighted, using 10 neighbors and Manhattan
metric.
2.2.5. Classification with support vector
machines (SV M )
SVMs were originally introduced by Vapnik in 1995
to solve a binary classification problem.44 Currently,
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SVMs are being widely used to solve manifold types
of supervised classification problems such as regres-
sion, clustering and multi-classification.44,45
In general, an SVM is looking for a hyperplane
that optimally separates the points of one class from
the other, considering the minimum distance possi-
ble to each of the characteristic vectors. Depending
on the number of parameters (features) and their
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dimensionality, it is necessary in some cases to make
a transformation in the vector space to get a sepa-
ration as optimal as possible. The concept of “opti-
mal separation” is where the fundamental character-
istic of SVM resides. This type of algorithm looks for
the hyperplane that possesses the minimum distance
(margin) with the points that are closer to itself.
That is why SVMs are also sometimes referred to
as maximum margin classifiers. In this way, the vec-
tor points that are labeled in one category will be on
one side of the hyperplane, and the cases that are in
the other category will be on the other side.
The search for the hyperplane of separation in the
transformed spaces, normally of very high dimension,
Fig. 2. Description of the D-SVM architecture.
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is based the so-called kernel functions.44 From an
algorithmic point of view, the geometric margin
optimization problem represents a quadratic opti-
mization problem with linear constraints that are
solved by means of standard quadratic programming
techniques.
2.2.6. Classification with deep support vector
machines (D-SV M )
Most deep learning methods for classification are
based on the union of fully-connected convolutional
layers (deep neural networks/dense neural networks).
These layers use the softmax function to learn from
low-level structures. However, there are some excep-
tions to this traditional architecture.33 In this paper,
the focus is put on SVM-based fully-connected lay-
ers. This is how this kind of D-SVM concept arises.
The idea emerges from the creation of a network
of assembled SVMs (SVM-Ensemble).32 For this
reason, the architecture of this model is a mix-
ture between statistically inspired machine learning
SVMs and a traditional artificial neural networks
configuration.
As shown in Fig. 2, a generic architecture can be
exhibited for this type of models. This multi-layer
architecture contains an Input Layer, a series of Hid-
den Layers and an Output Layer. Inside the k hidden
layers there are m SVMs that deliver new features to

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the next layer, ending up with the prediction in the
output layer. In order to carry out this assembly, a
series of operations must be carried out beforehand.
The system first trains a set of separate SVM clas-
sifiers, getting the data randomly from the training
dataset. Each SVM that composes the first D-SVM
layer is trained in the standard way. The next SVM
layers are trained with a combination of support vec-
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tors that belong to the previous layers. The process it
repeated for each of the layers. Only those paths that
produce the highest accuracy remain active. Finally,
the output layer will provide better features for clas-
sification than worked separately.32,46
Once the assembly has been carried out, attention
was on the flow of data belonging to the test and val-
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idation set. We observed that the different features
of the dataset are introduced randomly in the input
layer. The output of this first layer generates a new
dataset that will be used to train the next hidden
layer. This new dataset is composed of the correct
predictions of the previous model. Finally, when all
features have passed through the hidden layers, they
encounter the output layer. This output provides the
final classification of our item.
A difference with traditional swallow learning
algorithms is that better data is obtained for the
final classification task with the increase of layers,
according to the deep learning mechanism.
2.2.7. Configurations
Before developing any model based on D-SVM it is
recommended to perform a preconfiguration of the
different SVMs that shape it. In this way, an idea of
the range of parameters that will form the D-SVM is
gotten, as well as the best kernel functions to finally
find a good accuracy. Therefore, in first place the
parameters to be used in the D-SVM configurations
were studied.
The parameters of the several configurations are
described as follows. C is the penalty parameter
for each SVM. It sets the margin to the separa-
tion hyperplane. The gamma parameter defines the
reach-out of the influence of a single training exam-
ple. The gamma parameter defines how far the influ-
ence of a single training example goes, with low val-
ues meaning “far” and high values meaning “near”.
If gamma is too large, the radius of the area of
influence of the support vectors only includes the
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D-SVMs for the Identification of Stress Condition from EDA
support vector itself and no amount of adjustment
with C prevents over-fitting. The kernel is applied
in each data instance to locate the original nonlin-
ear observations in a higher-dimensional space when
they become separable. It makes it possible to sepa-
rate the different groups. Finally, degree establishes
the polynomial order in the case of using a poly-
nomial function. In most cases, for a same architec-
ture, different configurations were obtained that per-
formed well in our approach.44,47
Note that for the implementation of both SVMs
and D-SVMs, “scikit-learn”,48 “Keras”49 and “Ten-
sorFlow”50 machine learning platforms were used
under the Python programming language.
SVM Configurations. We started from a simple
model. As shown in Table 2, different ranges were
established for the values of the parameters. Our idea
was to only choose two or three configurations that
offered the best prediction capabilities according to
the chosen metrics for each of the intervals.
Different tests were carried out with the val-
ues obtained in a first approximation. These ranges
were oversized for all parameters. In general terms,
the solutions that made the model converge were
the simplest ones. The grid search method was
used to tune the hyper-parameters (C, gamma and
iterations) using different cross validations and neg-
ative squared root as a selection criterion.
D-SVM Configurations. According to the param-
eters obtained in the configuration of each SVM,
the architecture for the D-SVMs was configured. In
order to establish the number of layers and SVMs
per layer, the inverted pyramid method was imple-
mented. Indeed, this method has been widely used
in deep learning architectures.41,51–53
The inverted pyramid method was used to deter-
mine the number of SVMs in the input layer.51–53
Table 2. Configuration of the different SVMs.
Type Kernel C Gamma Degree Iters.
SVM1 Linear 1–102 10−5 –105 1 107
SVM2 Quadratic 1–102 10−5 –105 2 108
SVM3 Cubic 1–102 10−5 –105 3 108
SVM4 Polynomial 1–102 10−5 –105 4 108
SVM5 Polynomial 1–102 10−5 –105 5 108
SVM6 RBF 1–102 10−5 –105 — 108
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R. Sánchez-Reolid et al.

Table 3. Configuration of each layer in the D-SVMs. as more restrictive. Once the simulations had been
Input Hidden Output
carried out, the data obtained were used to carry
Type layer 1 layer 2 layer out statistical analyses. Different ANOVA analy-
ses were performed to establish differences between
D-SVM1 SVM1, SVM2, SVM3, — SVM3 groups and their level of significance. The p-value is
SVM4, SVM5
a statistic value that establishes if there are signifi-
D-SVM2 SVM1, SVM3, — SVM6
SVM4, SVM6 cant differences between groups. For the two datasets
(with/without overlapping), it was found that there
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D-SVM3 SVM1, SVM2, SVM3, SVM5, SVM6

SVM4, SVM5 SVM6 were no significant differences (p-value ≤ 0.05). This
is why, the same parameters (mean values) were used
in both cases.
Therefore, considering that√we tackled with 22 fea-
In Tables 4–6, the different mean and standard
tures, the input layer had 22 = 4.6 inputs. In the
deviation values are shown. It was decided to sep-
same manner in which deep learning uses an input
arate data in three intervals ([1,10], (10,20] and
layer composed of four or five neurons, here the input
(20, 40] s) because the proper method makes this
layer consisted of four and five SVMs. The same
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clustering after analyzing ANOVA differences.

criterion was followed for the hidden layers, which
means that one or two SVMs would be necessary.
In the case of using two SVMs, a final output layer Table 4. Configuration of the different SVMs for time
of one SVM was necessary. This criterion provided intervals between 1 and 10 s.
several configurations. Some of them are shown in Type Kernel C Gamma F1-score
Table 3. These were selected after picking the best
results obtained. SVM1 Linear 0.74 (.05) 220 (3) 0.59 (.14)
SVM2 Quadratic 0.87 (.25) 124 (7) 0.55 (.30)
SVM3 Cubic 1.50 (.50) 76 (1) 0.64 (.05)
3. Results SVM4 Polynomial 0.84 (.04) 56 (5) 0.68 (.22)
This paper was not only focused on determining SVM5 Polynomial 0.92 (.03) 60 (3) 0.65 (.32)
SVM6 RBF 1.30 (.34) 45 (9) 0.74 (.14)
the configuration of SVMs and D-SVMs to obtain a
higher accuracy in the classification of the emotional
conditions of calm and stress from EDA signals. We
Table 5. Configuration of the different SVMs for time
were also interested in knowing the minimum possi-
intervals between 10 and 20 s.
ble interval for the recognition of these two states.
In addition, we were looking to find out which is the Type Kernel C Gamma F1-score
influence of the different types of features (tempo-
SVM1 Linear 0.74 (.05) 420 (3) 0.74 (.05)
ral, statistical, frequential and morphological) in the SVM2 Quadratic 0.87 (.25) 324 (7) 0.75 (.04)
accuracy of the models. Finally, we were interested SVM3 Cubic 1.50 (.50) 156 (1) 0.76 (.04)
in knowing the best data segmentation model (with SVM4 Polynomial 0.84 (.04) 206 (5) 0.76 (.05)
or without interval overlapping). SVM5 Polynomial 0.92 (.03) 260 (3) 0.74 (.02)
SVM6 RBF 1.30 (.34) 235 (9) 0.78 (.01)
3.1. Optimized parameters for SVMs
and D-SVMs
Table 6. Configuration of the different SVMs for time
Once the simulations were carried out to obtain the intervals between 20 and 40 s.
optimal parameters according to each of the selected
Type Kernel C Gamma F1-score
time intervals, the C and gamma values that assured
the better results in terms of F1-score were selected. SVM1 Linear 0.74 (.05) 520 (3) 0.81 (.03)
With these parameters, a total of 50 simulations were SVM2 Quadratic 0.92 (.14) 424 (7) 0.82 (.03)
performed for each of the predictive models, for a SVM3 Cubic 1.63 (.50) 625 (1) 0.81 (.03)
randomly distributed dataset, 70% data for training, SVM4 Polynomial 0.46 (.14) 240 (5) 0.80 (.02)
SVM5 Polynomial 0.85 (.02) 469 (3) 0.81 (.03)
15% for test and 15% for validation, and cross val- SVM6 RBF 1.30 (.26) 545 (9) 0.83 (.01)
idations of 5, 7 and 10 folds. The latter were used

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D-SVMs for the Identification of Stress Condition from EDA

Table 7. Training time (mean and standard deviation) of the different classifiers.

Type Classifier [1,10] (10,20] (20,40]

Tree (fine) 6.02 (0.50) 9.87 (0.91) 9.62 (0.01)

Tree (medium) 4.25 (0.20) 8.89 (0.62) 4.75 (0.60)
Tree (coarse) 3.48 (0.45) 8.65 (0.50) 4.66 (0.30)
Logistic regression 6.48 (0.25) 9.65 (0.54) 5.52 (1.30)
Ensemble tree (boosted) 455.13 (0.20) 43.69 (1.66) 13.99 (0.42)
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Ensemble tree (bagged) 504.23 (3.30) 50.54 (3.55) 13.40 (0.39)

Ensemble tree (RUS boosted) 879.73 (1.60) 65.27 (3.98) 17.32 (0.18)
Ensemble tree (subspace KNN) 853.23 (0.62) 70.33 (2.67) 16.35 (0.00)
Linear discriminant 2.68 (0.25) 7.97 (1.29) 4.55 (0.32)
Naı̈ve Bayes (Gaussian) 4.09 (0.68) 9.45 (0.34) 5.44 (1.23)
Classical Naı̈ve Bayes 199.54 (0.23) 20.16 (2.32) 8.44 (1.02)
KNN (fine) 352.46 (3.52) 24.55 (0.53) 8.20 (0.63)
KNN (medium) 370.36 (2.61) 24.88 (0.61) 9.14 (0.36)
KNN (coarse) 374.81 (1.45) 23.45 (0.44) 8.67 (0.25)
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KNN (cosine) 384.25 (5.20) 26.75 (0.13) 8.60 (0.54)

KNN (weighted) 397.63 (2.78) 56.20 (0.24) 8.52 (0.85)
SVM (linear) 78.44 (2.03) 16.32 (0.26) 6.36 (1.50)
SVM (quadratic) 980.57 (6.02) 319.34 (4.02) 15.81 (0.10)
SVM (cubic) 1409.32 (5.36) 350.02 (2.30) 21.75 (0.05)
SVM (polynomial, fourth degree) 3600.21 (5.89) 560.20 (5.20) 120.36 (0.24)
SVM (polynomial, fifth degree) 3750.21 (2.46) 630.20 (1.20) 192.95 (0.84)
SVM (RBF) 334.32 (2.10) 20.65 (0.90) 6.82 (0.02)
D-SVM1 5302.98 (6.32) 2156.20 (20.00) 296.14 (3.12)
Deep D-SVM2 2800.58 (10.64) 1500.36 (22.30) 123.52 (4.50)
D-SVM3 9895.88 (20.65) 3456.20 (4.33) 428.36 (0.63)

As explained before, the simplest values that composed of an Intel-i5.4600 processor, 32 GB of

increased the performance of the classifier and
decreased the simulation time were selected. On the
other hand, these values also saved time and gave
accuracy in the construction of the D-SVMs.
Let us interpret the results in terms of the F1-
score metric for each of the intervals. In the interval
[1, 10] s (see Table 4), there are sub-optimal results.
For a linear kernel, the F1-score is around 59%. On
the other hand, the percentage of a nonlinear kernel
increases up to 74% for SVM6, radial basis function
(RBF) kernel. In the interval (10, 20] s (see Table 5),
the SVM6 RBF kernel’s F1-score is 78%. Lastly, all
kernels increase in F1-score up to 83% in the interval
(20, 40] s (see Table 6), once again for the SVM6 RBF
kernel. To sum up, RBF kernel outperforms in the
three cases analyzed.
3.2. Training times for all classifiers
One fundamental aspect when evaluating classi-
fiers is the training time and their efficiency. This
experiment was carried out with a desktop computer
RAM, 1 TB of hard disk and Ubuntu Linux 18.04
as operating system. Table 7 shows the time spent
to train each model. As foreseen, the methods con-
sidered as “classical” spend less time than the “deep”
ones.
The linear discriminant classifier takes the lowest
time for all intervals with 2.68 (0.25), 7.97 (1.29) and
4.55 (0.32) s for intervals [1, 10], (10, 20] and (20, 40],
respectively. In relation to the decision trees, the
Tree (fine) configuration takes longer to train than
the Tree (coarse) for the three intervals. For naı̈ve
Bayes, significantly less time to train the Naı̈ve Bayes
(Gaussian). In the case of ensemble methods, it usu-
ally takes longer to train for the [1, 10] s interval.
In contrast, they take significantly less time for the
(20, 40] s interval. KNN-based classifiers last between
352.46 and 397.63 s for the (1, 10] interval, while for
the (10, 20] interval it is between 20.16 and 56.20 s,
and for the (20, 40] interval it takes 8.52 and 9.14 s to
train. The explanation of the different training times
is described next. The linear discriminant looks for
linear combinations among different features. It ends

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R. Sánchez-Reolid et al.
up quickly when it does not find combinations, as is
the case here. On the other hand, the training time
of the decision trees depends on the number of splits
made on the data set. In our case, a fine configu-
ration (100 splits) spends more time than a coarse
one (4 splits). Moreover, the ensemble trees meth-
ods take more time than the methods based only on
decision trees due to their more complex topology.
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The KNN-based methods take an intermediate time
compared to the other classifiers. There are no signif-
icant differences for the intervals within the different
configurations.
Focusing on SVMs, these need significantly more
time than the other classical methods, except the
SVM (linear) and SVM (RBF) configuration. This
Int. J. Neur. Syst. Downloaded from www.worldscientific.com
may be due to the learning methods used and the
kernel functions associated with that process. By
increasing the degree of the polynomial (SVM (lin-
ear), SVM (quadratic), SVM (cubic), SVM (poly-
nomial, fourth degree) and SVM (polynomial, fifth
degree)), the time needed to train grows. In the end,
as told before, D-SVM-based methods take much
longer to train than all the rest of classifiers. D-SVM
takes much longer due to two main reasons, the asso-
ciated kernel function of the SVMs that compose it
and the increase in the number of layers.
3.3. Stress detection for all classifiers
Table 8 shows the results of the simulations per-
formed with all classifiers. Within decision trees the
configuration that works best for all signal inter-
vals is the Tree (coarse). The best F1-score obtained
is 65.32% and the area under the curve (AUC) is
0.59. For logistic regression we have that the best
result is for the (20, 40] interval with an F1-score of
73.00% and an AUC of 0.66. The best result of the
ensemble methods for interval [1, 10] is Ensemble tree
(RUS boosted) with and F1-score of 66.02% and an
AUC of 0.59. In interval [10, 20] the best result is
for Tree-Bagged with 72.32% for F1-score and 0.68
for AUC. Finally, Ensemble tree (boosted) shows the
best result for the interval (20, 40], with 75.32% for
F1-score and 0.60 for AUC. On the other hand, for
linear discriminant the best result for F1-score is
43.65% and AUC of 0.59. In the Naı̈ve Bayes group
we have the best result for the (10, 20] interval with
an F1-score of 43.50% and and AUC of 0.59. Lastly,
the best performance in the KNN group is 82.69% of
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F1-score with an AUC of 0.81 for the (20, 40] time
interval.
Using the values of the parameters obtained so
far, several simulations were carried out using both
SVMs and D-SVMs. Table 8 shows the results for
the SVM and D-SVM models in terms of the F1-score
and AUC metrics. The best results for the time inter-
val [1, 10] s were 74% and 92% for SVM (polyno-
mial, fifth degree) and D-SVM1, respectively. For the
interval (10, 20], the best results were 78% for SVM
(polynomial, fifth degree) and 89% for D-SVM1.
Finally, for time interval (20, 40], the best results
were 83% for SVM (polynomial, fifth degree) and
92% for D-SVM1. To sum up, distance-based classi-
fiers (KNN and SVM) have a good performance in
large time intervals. As the D-SVM models are fed
by SVMs, their F-score is the best in all intervals.
3.4. Influence of different groups of
features in SVM and D-SVM
Refocusing on the intention of comparing SVMs and
D-SVMs, another analysis carried out on the dataset
was to verify how each type of parameter affected the
metrics of the model. Different tests were carried out
in which the following results were obtained. These
analyses consisted in training a same model but with
the difference that a group of parameters was elim-
inated on each training set. Another of the analyses
was also to group the parameters in permutations
of two into two categories. Table 9 shows the model
that provided the best result measured as F1-score
for each of the configurations.
3.5. Minimal time interval
with/without
overlapping for SVM and D-SVM
Thanks to the selection of the parameters that opti-
mize each SVM, our workload was reduced sub-
stantively. It allowed us to determine with preci-
sion which is the minimum interval in seconds that
allowed us to differentiate between a condition of
calm and stress. Figures 3 and 4 show the F1-score
obtained with each of the test sets for a cross val-
idation CV = 10 on all SVMs and D-SVMs. As
already mentioned, there are no significant differ-
ences between the results obtained with overlapping
and without overlapping.
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D-SVMs for the Identification of Stress Condition from EDA

Table 8. Mean F1-score (mean and standard deviation) and AUC value of the different classifiers.

[1,10] (10,20] (20,40]

Classifier F1-score (%) AUC F1-score (%) AUC F1-score (%) AUC

Tree (fine) 42.76 (0.45) 0.57 (0.04) 43.10 (0.06) 0.66 (0.20) 60.32 (3.82) 0.59 (0.14)
Tree (medium) 43.76 (1.35) 0.59 (0.12) 45.50 (0.67) 0.64 (0.20) 57.32 (1.43) 0.58 (0.14)
Tree (coarse) 46.76 (1.15) 0.55 (0.03) 47.00 (0.67) 0.55 (0.12) 65.32 (0.28) 0.59 (0.08)
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Logistic
regression 59.62 (0.40) 0.65 (0.08) 70.00 (0.01) 0.68 (0.01) 73.00 (0.78) 0.66 (0.12)
Ensemble tree
(boosted) 60.32 (3.82) 0.59 (0.14) 70.32 (0.37) 0.62 (0.11) 75.32 (0.30) 0.60 (0.01)
Ensemble tree
(bagged) 61.20 (1.82) 0.59 (0.14) 72.32 (0.10) 0.68 (0.31) 71.32 (0.12) 0.60 (0.01)
Ensemble tree
(RUS boosted) 66.02 (4.82) 0.59 (0.14) 70.32 (0.20) 0.68 (0.21) 70.85 (0.02) 0.62 (0.38)
Ensemble tree
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(subspace KNN) 64.17 (2.82) 0.59 (0.14) 70.32 (0.06) 0.69 (0.21) 70.65 (0.20) 0.61 (0.12)
Linear
discriminant 26.03 (4.65) 0.56 (0.30) 43.65 (2.45) 0.59 (0.08) 40.32 (0.98) 0.53 (0.04)
Naı̈ve Bayes
(Gaussian) 36.80 (1.55) 0.56 (0.54) 43.50 (0.80) 0.59 (0.80) 40.32 (0.86) 0.56 (0.24)
Naı̈ve Bayes 42.76 (2.55) 0.57 (0.43) 43.50 (0.67) 0.59 (0.20) 40.32 (6.48) 0.53 (0.14)
KNN (fine) 60.22 (0.23) 0.78 (0.00) 70.23 (0.15) 0.78 (0.09) 80.69 (0.25) 0.81 (0.04)
KNN (medium) 61.62 (0.03) 0.75 (0.01) 71.30 (0.05) 0.81 (0.04) 82.69 (0.10) 0.81 (0.04)
KNN (coarse) 61.20 (0.02) 0.75 (0.00) 72.00 (0.25) 0.76 (0.02) 81.90 (0.00) 0.81 (0.04)
KNN (cosine) 65.36 (0.05) 0.78 (0.02) 70.30 (0.05) 0.82 (0.10) 80.69 (0.25) 0.81 (0.04)
KNN (weighted) 60.64 (0.01) 0.79 (0.01) 71.30 (0.52) 0.82 (0.10) 80.69 (0.25) 0.81 (0.04)
SVM (linear) 59.02 (0.14) 0.55 (0.80) 74.00 (0.05) 0.68 (0.01) 81.00 (0.78) 0.76 (0.32)
SVM (quadratic) 55.43 (0.30) 0.59 (0.70) 75.38 (0.04) 0.72 (0.01) 82.01 (0.03) 0.78 (0.32)
SVM (cubic) 64.30 (0.05) 0.69 (0.58) 76.00 (0.04) 0.76 (0.90) 81.10 (0.03) 0.86 (0.32)
SVM (polynomial,
fourth degree) 65.00 (0.12) 0.80 (0.02) 74.03 (0.25) 0.80 (0.02) 81.03 (0.05) 0.82 (0.10)
SVM (polynomial,
fifth degree) 74.00 (0.14) 0.78 (0.01) 78.10 (0.01) 0.81 (0.20) 83.00 (0.00) 0.80 (0.00)
SVM (RBF) 68.09 (0.54) 0.78 (0.04) 76.31 (0.21) 0.78 (0.15) 80.87 (0.42) 0.80 (0.40)
D-SVM1 92.01 (0.01) 0.80 (0.40) 89.10 (0.03) 0.78 (0.02) 92.01 (0.01) 0.80 (0.40)
D-SVM2 84.31 (0.02) 0.76 (0.32) 84.12 (0.02) 0.77 (1.02) 84.12 (0.02) 0.77 (1.02)
D-SVM3 72.01 (1.03) 0.74 (0.50) 78.5 (0.23) 0.75 (0.02) 79.00 (0.20) 0.76 (0.30)

In accordance with some related works, an
F1-score threshold of 70% to enabled differentiating
between the two conditions (calm and stress),2,6,20,35
and the minimum interval for identifying a condition
was 3 s for SVMs (see Fig. 3). When increasing the
threshold to an outstanding 80%, only 4 s were neces-
sary for D-SVMs (see Fig. 4) to differentiate between
the conditions.
4. Discussion
Let us remind that this research is based on deter-
mining whether D-SVMs are useful to differentiate
between calm/stress conditions in the same way as
SVMs do.6,39 Currently, D-SVMs and SVMs, as well
as other machine learning methods, have the poten-
tial to be used in applications requiring the detection
of the emotional state of a person.
Previous studies have postulated that it is not
possible to quickly determine stress from EDA sig-
nals because it is a slow physiological variable when
compared with others (e.g. electroencephalographic
signals and heart rate, among others).40,54 According
to the literature, the time interval from the moment
the stimulus occurs until the change in EDA appears
is 3 or 4 s. Therefore, a challenge arises for shortening
the minimum interval of time that a system requires

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R. Sánchez-Reolid et al.

Table 9. Influence on F1-score (mean and standard deviation) of the parameter type for several SVMs and
D-SVMs.

Parameter type SVM D-SVM

Time
interval (s) Temporal Morphological Frequential Kernel F1-score (%) Type F1-score (%)

× Linear/cubic 82.6 (0.32) D-SVM1 92.6 (0.02)

× Quadratic 71.6 (1.02) D-SVM2 84.8 (0.20)
[1, 10] × RBF 82.6 (1.40) D-SVM1 83.2 (0.85)
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× × Quadratic 82.6 (0.58) D-SVM1 87.6 (0.05)

× × Cubic 82.6 (2.35) D-SVM1 85.3 (0.45)
× × RBF 82.6 (1.02) D-SVM1 86.4 (0.01)

× Linear/cubic 82.6 (0.25) D-SVM1 92.6 (0.20)

× Quadratic 71.6 (0.41) D-SVM2 84.8 (0.14)
(10,20] × RBF 82.6 (0.13) D-SVM1 83.2 (0.02)
× × Quadratic 82.6 (0.62) D-SVM1 87.6 (0.04)
× × Cubic 82.6 (0.14) D-SVM1 85.3 (0.04)
Int. J. Neur. Syst. Downloaded from www.worldscientific.com

× × RBF 82.6 (0.01) D-SVM1 86.4 (0.00)

× Linear/cubic 82.6 (0.03) D-SVM1 92.6 (0.02)

× Quadratic 71.6 (0.01) D-SVM2 84.8 (0.05)
(20,40] × RBF 82.6 (0.02) D-SVM1 83.2 (0.03)
× × Quadratic 82.6 (0.02) D-SVM1 87.6 (0.13)
× × Cubic 82.6 (0.02) D-SVM1 85.3 (0.30)
× × RBF 82.6 (0.00) D-SVM1 86.4 (0.00)

Fig. 3. F1-score variation for each SVM with optimal configuration at each time interval for CV = 10.

to classify the emotional condition. Hence, the results
obtained in our study are comparable to and even
improve the outcomes of more classical methods. In
the literature related to the detection of stress with
SVMs it has been established that the accuracy range
is between 75% and 90%.23,28,55,56
Moreover, the accuracy is higher for greater inter-
vals of time. Most papers on the topic provide anal-
yses that have to process data during 20 to 40 s as a
rule. Although a paper has demonstrated that after
10 s the calm/stress condition of a person can be
established with some precision,6 this interval has
been shortened in our approach by using D-SVM
configurations (down to 3 s). This is the reason why
our focus has been different to other approaches.
Instead of analyzing a signal of a certain time length,
we were interested in knowing what is the minimum
interval for differentiating between calm and stress

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Fig. 4. F1-score variation for each D-SVM with optimal configuration at each time interval for CV = 10.
Int. J. Neur. Syst. Downloaded from www.worldscientific.com
conditions. At the same time, we were interested in
understanding why this happens. In our study, the
minimum time interval using an SVM has been cal-
culated to be 4 s. On the other hand, the minimum
detection interval is 3 s for the D-SVM architecture.
We believe that this 1-s decrease is due to the fact
that this type of architecture is much faster in dis-
covering the patterns in the parameters that compose
the EDA signals.
We can consider that each of the models
described in this work perform well in terms of
detecting both calm and stress conditions due to the
great ease inherent to SVMs in handling a large num-
ber of features. On the contrary, it becomes more dif-
ficult to administer the amount of data generated in
D-SVMs. It is necessary to manage the new training
datasets generated in the successive layers. If this is
not considered seriously, the design of D-SVMs can
generate numerous errors that get larger as the num-
ber of layers increase.46 In our case, these errors have
been solved by generating all the datasets for each of
the layers at the same time, always respecting that
they were randomly separated.
A thorough review of the literature on stress
detection reveals that most works agree that stress
is a very difficult subject and its measurement is not
an easy task. There are many markers that can be
used, as for instance, EDA, blood volume pressure,
accelerometers, electroencephalography, and so on.
Many algorithms can be applied, and many forms
of stress can be observed.11,21,22,57,58 Moreover, the
results provided in all these works should be taken
with caution due to the existence of many ways
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D-SVMs for the Identification of Stress Condition from EDA
distress is produced (stressors). In this respect, the
results achieved in this work have given an F1-score
of 83% for SVM and 92% for D-SVM. Note that the
best results have always been obtained with the RBF
kernel. In comparison with the results obtained in
other related studies, it is possible to conclude that
those obtained in our approach are comparable, and
for most works slightly better. In other approaches,
generally using more than one sensor, stress detec-
tion ranges between 80% and 95%. Our method uses
solely skin conductance response features to provide
a high performance comparable to other works.
On the other side, we have to consider a num-
ber of constraints and limitations. First, the experi-
ment was conducted in a controlled environment on
middle-aged volunteers. For this reason, the results
cannot be generalized beyond the age range of the
participants (18 to 44 years). The second limitation
is the quality of the data obtained. In acquisition
systems based on physiological signals, it is common
that artefacts occur which damage or worsen the sig-
nal. In our case, we ran an experiment very similar to
some of our previous ones. For this reason, the prob-
lems that normally appear in this type of acquisition
systems were solved.
5. Conclusions
This paper has introduced D-SVMs as novel meth-
ods for the detection of stress/calm conditions. Until
now, this kind of classification through EDA sig-
nals has mostly been carried out by using SVMs,
although several contributions have been made with
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R. Sánchez-Reolid et al.
other binary classifiers. In this paper, we decided
to make a comparison study between more classic
methods and D-SVMs. The results have shown that
D-SVMs outperform in terms of F1-score, obtaining
values from 89.10% to 92.01%, improving the classic
methods that reached 83.00%. Nonetheless, as future
work, it is our intention to also use other novel classi-
fication methods based on artificial neural networks
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like recurrent neural networks, long short-term mem-
ory and deep neural networks.59–62
Our most significant contribution is the develop-
ment of a complete acquisition, signal processing and
classification system based on SVMs and D-SVMs
with a high ability to discriminate between calm and
stress conditions. In this study, it has also been made
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possible to identify the contributions of parameters
based on time domain, signal morphology and fre-
quency domain to the F1-score of the classifiers based
on SVMs.
In this paper, D-SVMs have demonstrated to pro-
vide robustness at a not too high computational cost.
Although D-SVMs take significantly more time to
train than the others, their predictions are much bet-
ter. In addition, once the model is trained, the pre-
diction is instantaneous for all models. The results
obtained in our studies indicate the possibility of
constructing efficient and simplified models with
configurable parameters. Thus, the computational
cost and time for development and implementa-
tion are reduced. Their development is especially
designed to solve problems with a high number of
features.
We have found that the best way to develop a
highly accurate classifier is to use the three types
of parameters (time domain, signal morphology and
frequency domain) on each of the signals. But in the
case of not being able to use all of them, those that
make the greatest contribution are within the time
domain of the signal. The simplicity of the classi-
fication model enables this scheme to operate in a
long term. An additional relevant aspect found is
that the use of a noninvasive (commercial) device
makes it possible to constantly monitor EDA and
to have a larger dataset to work with. The use of
such devices assists in identifying the different stages
of stress in a more continuous manner over time,
also potentially capable of attending emotional self-
regulation.
2050031-14
Acknowledgments
This work has been partially supported by Spanish
Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación, Agencia Estatal
de Investigación (AEI)/European Regional Devel-
opment Fund (FEDER, UE) under PID2019-
106084RB-I00 and DPI2016-80894-R grants, by
Castilla-La Mancha Regional Government SBPLY/
17/180501/000192 grant, and by CIBERSAM of
the Instituto de Salud Carlos III. Roberto Sánchez-
Reolid holds BES-2017-081958 scholarship from
Spanish Ministerio de Educación y Formación
Profesional.
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