Diagnosis of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder with combined time and frequency features

Abstract The aim of this study was to build a machine learning model to discriminate Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) patients and healthy controls using information from both time and frequency analysis of Event Related Potentials (ERP) obtained from Electroencephalography (EEG) signals while participants performed an auditory oddball task. The study included 23 unmedicated ADHD patients and 23 healthy controls. The EEG signal was analyzed in time domain by nonlinear brain dynamics and morphological features, and in time-frequency domain with wavelet coefficients. Selected features were applied to various machine learning techniques including; Multilayer Perceptron, Naive Bayes, Support Vector Machines, k-nearest neighbor, Adaptive Boosting, Logistic Regression and Random Forest to classify ADHD patients and healthy controls. Longer P300 latencies and smaller P300 amplitudes were observed in ADHD patients relative to controls. In fractal dimension calculation relative to the control group, the ADHD group demonstrated reduced complexity. In addition, certain wavelet coefficients provided significantly different values in both groups. Combining these extracted features, our results indicated that Multilayer Perceptron method provided the best classification with an accuracy rate of 91.3% and a high level of reliability of concurrence (Kappa = 0.82). The results showed that combining time and frequency domain features can be a useful and discriminative for diagnostic purposes in ADHD. The study presents a supporting diagnostic tool that uses EEG signal processing and machine learning algorithms. The findings would be helpful in the objective diagnosis of ADHD.