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Detection of Alcoholism from EEG signals using Spectral and Tsallis Entropy
with SVM

Conference Paper · June 2021

DOI: 10.1109/ICCICT50803.2021.9510071

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 Detection of Alcoholism from EEG signals using
Spectral and Tsallis Entropy with SVM
1st Digambar Puri 2nd Rohit Chudiwal 3rd Jaswantsing Rajput
Dept. Electronics and Telecom. Dept. Electronics and Telecom. Dept. Electronics and Telecom.
R.A.I.T., Mumbai. R.A.I.T., Nerul, Research Scholer at Dr.B.A.T.U.
Research Scholer at Dr. B.A.T.U. Lonere. Navi Mumbai, India Lonere, India
digspuri@gmail.com rohit.chudiwal@rait.ac.in jaswantsing@dbatu.ac.in

4th Sanjay Nalbalwar 5th Anil Nandgaonkar 6th Abhay Wagh

Dept.Electronics and Telecom. Dept. Electronics and Telecom. Director, Maharashtra State
Dr. B.A.T. University, Dr. B.A.T. University, Directorate of Technical Education,
Lonere, India Lonere, India Mumbai, India
slnalbalwar@dbatu.ac.in abnandgaonkar@dbatu.ac.in director@dte.gov.in

Abstract—Alcoholism is the most common disorder. It leads
to various emotional, behavioral, and cognitive brain defects.
Finding and extracting discriminative biological markers, which
are correlated to healthy brain patterns and alcoholic brain
pattern helps us to utilize automatic methods for detecting and
classifying alcoholism. In this study, we evaluate the complexity
of Electroencephalogram (EEG) dynamics using Spectral entropy
(SpEn) and Tsallis entropy (TsEn) and results are used to dis-
tinguish alcoholic from Controlled subjects. Our analysis shows
that the SpEn and TsEn values for alcoholic EEG signals and
lower compared to Controlled. The feature vectors from SpEn
and TsEn are provided to various supervised and unsupervised
classification techniques with 10-fold cross-validation. Among
these Support Vector Machine (SVM) and K-Nearest Neighbors
(KNN) gave maximum accuracy of 95.6% and 92.2% respectively.
Hence, our hybrid approach of combining SpEn and TsEn helps
to diagnose alcoholism to medical practitioners.
Index Terms—Electroencephalogram (EEG), Support Vector
Machine (SVM), Spectral Entropy (SpEn), Tsallis Entropy
(TsEn) k-Nearest Neighbour(k-NN) classifier.
I. I NTRODUCTION
Alcoholism is common neurological disorder affecting al-
most 10% of overall population of the world [1]. From last
few decades, rate of consumption of alcohol rises every year in
India. According to National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB)
press release, one casualty is reported for every 90 minutes
on account of alcoholism in India [2]. Depending on the
amount of Alcohol consummation, it has short-term and long-
term consequences on human brain. Short-term may lead to
mobility and cognitive impairments like slurred speech, slow
reaction, impaired memory, difficulty in walking. The long-
term consequences such as alcohol poisoning, liver damage,
high blood pressure and permanent damage to brain [3].
The brain related medical measures study by various
techniques, such as Positron Emission Tomography (PET),
Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Functional Magnetic
Resonance Imaging (fMRI), Electroencephalogram (EEG) and
many other Bio-markers. However, EEG signals have high
temporal resolution, non-invasive, low cost and portable com-
pared to other imaging techniques, therefore EEG is the
best choice for the detection of many neurological disorders.
Basically, EEG signals are just electrical variations result of
firing of various neurons in the brain captured by placing
various electrodes on the scalp of human being. EEG is very
effective tool to study brain and identify the alcoholic from
healthy subject [4].
Literature shows, time domain, frequency domain, time-
frequency domain and statistical methods are most common
techniques used to detect the alcoholism. Many academicians
and researchers have studied estimation of entropies as mea-
sure of EEG complexity [5]. In time domain, Approximate
entropy and Shannon entropy [6] and wavelet spectral entropy
and spectral entropy have been used in time-frequency domain
to extract the feature vector [7]. A second order autoregressive
model and MLP-BP, LD and SFA classifiers were applied
to discriminate to alcoholic from control subjects, which
provides errors of 2.8%, 2.6% and 11.9% in classification rate
respectively [8].
The author in [9] have proposed a method based on Relative
Wavelet Bi-spectrum with Back Propagation Neural Network
(BPNN) for the detection of alcoholism. It achived highest
accuracy of 90%. A Wavelet Packet based statistical measure
technique have been proposed in [10]. The detection of alco-
holic have done with SVM and reached to 6% classification
error. Similarly, various methods related to functional connec-
tivity of brain also proposed in the literature [11,23]. The
number of channels is the limitation of these methods. Due
to non-linearity of the EEG signals, the existing methods are
still limited to find more distinct hidden features from EEG
recordings.
In this work, Spectral Entropy (SpEn) and Tsallis Entropy
(TsEn) of EEG signals is estimated to find possible difference
in complexity between alcoholic and control group. The sig-
nificant difference has been observed in both SpEn and TsEn
 TABLE I
S UBJECT DETAILS OF EEG RECORDED SIGNALS FOR A LCOHOLIC AND
N ORMAL

Alcoholic Normal
Male Subjects 77 48
Age 20-50 years 20-39 years
Mean Age 35.83 years 25.81 years
Electrodes 64 64
Sampling
256 sam/sec 256 sam/sec
Frequency

Fig. 1. Block diagram for proposed method

values for EEG signals of both class. The SpEn and TsEn
values of EEG are lower for alcoholic compare to control
subjects. The feature vectors extracted from SpEn and TsEn
provided to various supervised and unsupervised classifiers to
alcoholic and control subject. The proposed method schematic
block diagram has shown in Fig. 1. Fig. 2. Sample EEG signals from central electrode (Cz): (A) Alcoholic (B)
The paper organized as: Section II describes the details Controlled subject
of EEG data sets used in this study. Section III deals with
methods and materials employed to experiment to classify
EEG into alcoholic and normal one. We presented the results B. Spectral Entropy (SpEn)
obtained from proposed algorithm and compared with various Spectral Entropy gives the information of complexity of
other classification methods have shown in section IV. Finally, the signal. SpEn works on the basis of width of the signal’s
we have concluded the work in section V. spectrum. Wider spectrum reflects the higher value of entropy
where as narrow spectrum gives low value of SpEn. SpEn
II. M ATERIALS AND M ETHODS
were calculated from Power spectral density by evaluating
A. Acquisition of EEG Signals hamming window-modified Periodogram of the signal. The
The EEG dataset of alcoholic and controlled subjects have SpEn coefficients can be computed by given formula,
been taken from publicly available dataset from University X 1
of California, Irvine Knowledge Discovery in Database (UCI- SpEn = − Pi .log( ) (1)
Pi
KDD), Machine Learning Repository [12,13]. There were i
122 subjects voluntarily participated in EEG data collection
where, Pi is the average power. When a time-frequency
process. Each subject has completed 120 trials of 1 second
power spectrogram S(t,f) has been provided, the probability
time duration. Each subject had exposed to picture of objects
distribution at instant t is,
while EEG recording. These pictures were selected from the
1980 Snodgrass and Vanderwart picture set [14]. All EEG S(t, i)
signals were recorded from 64 electrodes placed on the scalps P (t, i) = P (2)
f S(t, f )
of human being. These electrodes were placed according to
standard 10-20 electrode placement method. These recorded Then the spectral entropy at time t is,
signals are sampled at 256 samples per second. The noise
N
involved in these signals has been eliminated by using lowpass X
SpEn(t) = − P (t, i)log2 (P (t, i) (3)
filter. The power line frequency has been removed by using
i=1
butterworth notch filter. The subject details have been shown
in Table 1. The sample EEG signals of Cz electrode from SE is also widely used as a feature in speech, image, biomed-
alcoholic and normal subject is shown in Fig. 2. ical signal processing [4].
 III. R ESULTS AND D ISCUSSION

TABLE II
P ERFORMANCE OF CLASSIFIERS FOR S PECTRAL E NTROPY FEATURE SETS

Accuracy F1-score Precision Recall AUC

(%) (%) (%) (%) (%)
SVM 90.8 90.7 91 90.8 95.1
RF 88.7 88.6 88.9 88.7 92.9
MLPNN 88.6 89.6 89.6 89.6 93.4
NB 86.7 86.8 86.9 86.7 91.3
KNN 89.6 90.5 90.7 90.6 95.3
AdaBoost 82.6 82.5 82.6 82.6 81.7

TABLE III
P ERFORMANCE OF CLASSIFIERS FOR T SALLIS E NTROPY FEATURE SETS

Fig. 3. Mean Tsallis entropy of all 16-channels for Alcoholic and Normal Accuracy F1-score Precision Recall AUC
subjects EEG (%) (%) (%) (%) (%)
SVM 91.9 91.8 92 91.9 93.6
RF 89.2 90.1 90.6 91.2 94.5
C. Tsallis Entropy (TsEn) MLPNN 88.1 90.5 92.2 90.1 93.9
NB 87.3 87.3 87.5 87.3 93.7
Tsallis entropy was firstly introduced by Constantino Tsallis KNN 90.1 91.1 91.3 92.1 94.8
in 1988 as a basis for AdaBoost 84.9 84.9 84.9 84.9 84.1
XN
Sq = ( Pi − pqi )/(q − 1) (4) In this experiment, we have used the EEG signals recorded
i from 122 (74-Alcoholic and 48 Normal) subjects with 64
where Sq is Tsallis entropy value, Pi is probability of ith electrodes. Each Subject has completed 120 different trials of
state, N- no of states. More information on Tsallis entropy EEG recording for one second under the same environmental
is provided in [15,16]. The TsEn values of more distinct 16 conditions. The SpEn and TsEn techniques were applied to
electrodes have shown in Fig. 3. all 64 channel artifact free EEG signals of alcoholic and
healthy class. We have evaluated the performance of the
D. Support Vector Machine(SVM)
various supervised and unsupervised classifiers by calculating
The supervised learning method, SVM was first proposed the performance parameters: Accuracy, Recall, f-score, Preci-
by Vapnik (1995) that can be widely-used in various regres- sion, Area under curve (AUC) with 10- fold cross validation
sion analysis and statistical classification problems (Using an technique for splitting of training and testing dataset. Three
improved relative error support vector machine for body fat different experiments were carried out.
prediction). The has ability to maximize the margin from
• First experiment: Initially the feature vectors obtained
support vectors and confirms the least error by defining a sepa-
by Spectral Entropy (SpEn) used to separate the two
rating hyperphane between two classes.Consider, f : X → Y ,
x ∈ X, y ∈ {−1, 1} [22]. then, the subjective function can be
written as, TABLE IV
f (x) = w.x + b (5) P ERFORMANCE OF CLASSIFIERS FOR S PECTRAL AND T SALLIS E NTROPY
FEATURE SETS
where, w is the weight matrix. SVM optimizes above equation
under the objective function [4], Accuracy F1-score Precision Recall AUC
(%) (%) (%) (%) (%)
m SVM 95.6 95.1 95.2 95.2 98.3
1 2
X
arg min ||w|| + C ζi (6) RF 90.5 90.4 90.5 90.5 96.1
2 i=1 MLPNN 91.1 91.1 91.1 91.1 94.7
NB 79 79 79 79 86.8
Above equation generates coefficients of hyper-plane which KNN 92.2 92.6 92.6 92.6 92.5
maximizes separation between w.x+b = −1 and w.x+b = 1. AdaBoost 88.1 88.1 88.1 88.1 87.5

E. k-Nearest Neighbour (k-NN)

TABLE V
k-NN is one of the simplest Supervised Machine Learning P ERFORMANCE OF SVM AND K-NN FOR VARIOUS FEATURE SETS
non- parametric algorithms. It works on the basis of Euclidean
Accuracy (%)
distance of K neighbors. k-NN is called lazy learner algorithm SVM KNN
due to it’s action on the testing dataset, first it stores data SpEn 90.8 89.6
and uses all the stored data for unknown classification. More TsEn 91.9 90.1
details will get in [17]. SpEn+TsEn 95.6 92.2
 TABLE VI
P ERFORMANCE OF PROPOSED METHOD WITH OTHER EXISTING TECHNIQUES USING SAME DATASET

Contributor Feature Extraction Classifier Accuracy

largest lyapunov, Approximate entropy,
Acharya et al. [18] SVM with RBF kernel 91.7%
exponent, sample entropy
Zhu et al. [11] 13-D horizontal and visibility graph entropy K-NN and SVM 87.5%
Shri et al. [19] Approximate entropy with ANVO test BPNN and SVM 90%
Kumar et al. [20] EEG absolute band power SVM and LDA 88%
Mean absolute difference, inter quartile range, Extreme learning machine,
Taran et al. [21] 93.75%
covariance and entropy LS - SVM
S. Bavkar et al. [22] EMD : Variance, Skewness, Kurtosis Gaussian SVM 94%
Gopika et al. [24] Spectral entropy features KNN MLP classifier 93.08%
Padma et al. [5] Spectral Entropy KNN 90.41%
Puri et al. [10] WPT SVM 94%
Proposed Method Spectral Entropy and Tsallis Entropy SVM 95.6%

classes using SVM, k-NN, MLPNN, RF, NB, and Ad-

aBoost. The performance parameters for each classifier
have been mentioned in Table II. The SVM performs
better compared to other classifiers and provided the
accuracy of 90.8%. The k-NN gave the accuracy of
89%. RF, MLPNN,NB also provided 88.7%, 88.6%, and
86.7% respectively. The adaBoost performs poor on SpEn
feature vectors compare to other classifiers.
• Second Experiment: The feature vectors obtained by
Tsallis Entropy (SpEn) used to separate alcoholic and
Controlled using SVM, k-NN, MLPNN, RF, NB, and
AdaBoost. The performance parameters for each classifier
have been mentioned in Table III. The SVM gave the
accuracy of 91.9%. The k-NN gave the accuracy of 90%.
RF, MLPNN,AdaBoost also provided 89.2%, 88.1%, and Fig. 4. Accuracy plot of all classifiers for SpEn, TsEn and SpEn+TsEn feature
sets
84.9% respectively. The NB performs poor on TsEn
feature vectors compare to other classifiers and gave 67%
accuracy only. Fig. 3 shows that TsEn values of alcoholic vectors from SpEn and TsEn.
are lower than for controls. The reduction in the TsEn is Recently, non-linear methods for complexity measures of
due to slowing of EEG in alcoholic subjects. Hence, the EEG signals like largest lyapunov exponent, approximated
complexity of EEG signal reduced in alcoholic condition, entropy, sample entropy have been proposed [18]. The author
this can be used as effective biomarker to separate the in [24] reported Spectral Entropy as features with KNN and
alcoholic and normal one. MLPNN to classify alcoholic from Normal and achieved
• Third Experiment The feature vectors generated by com- maximum accuracy of 93%. Further, EMD based features
bining SpEn and TsEn have used to classify two classes. have been used for classification of alcoholic and normal
Again SVM provided the maximum accuracy of 95.6% EEG signals with SVM and reached to 94% classification
with more than 95% values of Recall, f-score, Precision, accuracy [22]. The proposed method is combination of two
AUC. k-NN and MLPNN gave the 92.2% and 91.1% different entropies to find the complexity of EEG signals.
accuracy respectively. For the combined feature vector With these feature sets got the maximum accuracy up to 96%.
set, RF performs poor than other classifiers with accuracy The comparison of present method with recently proposed
is less than 80%. The performance parameters for each few methods have shown in Table VI. The proposed work
classifier have been mentioned in Table IV. provides more accuracy compared with state-of-art techniques.
The accuracy obtained in all three experiments by SVM This method can be applied for the detection of Alzheimer’s
and k-NN has been shown in Table V and performance of all disease, epilepsy, and other neurological disorders.
classifiers used in the experiment in terms of accuracy have
shown in Fig. 4. It has been confirmed that, the combination of IV. C ONCLUSION
Tsallis entropy and Spectral entropy combine feature vector set In this study, we evaluate the complexity of Electroen-
provided better accuracy for SVM compared individual feature cephalogram (EEG) dynamics using Spectral entropy (SpEn)
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