QuadTPat: Quadruple Transition Pattern-based explainable feature engineering model for stress detection using EEG signals.

The most cost-effective data collection method is electroencephalography (EEG), which obtains meaningful information about the brain. Therefore, EEG signal processing is crucial for neuroscience and machine learning (ML). Therefore, a new EEG stress dataset has been collected, and an explainable feature engineering (XFE) model has been proposed using the Directed Lobish (DLob) symbolic language. The first phase of this research is the data collection phase, and an EEG stress dataset was gathered from 310 participants. This collected stress dataset contains two classes: (i) stress and (ii) control. An XFE model has been presented to detect stress automatically. The presented XFE model has four main phases, and these are (i) channel transformer and quadruple transition pattern (QuadTPat)-based feature generation, (ii) feature selection deploying cumulative weighted neighborhood component analysis (CWNCA), (iii) explainable results creation with DLob and (iv) classification with t algorithm-based k-nearest neighbors (tkNN) classifier. The proposed XFE model generates a DLob string, and the explainable results were obtained using this string. Moreover, the presented XFE model attained 92.95% and 73.63% classification accuracy, deploying 10-fold and leave-one subject-out (LOSO) cross-validations (CV). According to the classification performances, the recommended QuadTPat-based XFE is a good model for EEG signal classification. Also, the presented QuadTPat-based XFE model is a good model for explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) since TTPat-based XFE is cooperating with the DLob.