A Learnable and Explainable Wavelet Neural Network for EEG Artifacts Detection and Classification

Electroencephalography (EEG) artifacts are very common in clinical diagnosis and can heavily impact diagnosis. Manual screening of artifact events is labor-intensive with little benefit. Therefore, exploring algorithms for automatic detection and classification of EEG artifacts can significantly assist clinical diagnosis. In this paper, we propose a learnable and explainable wavelet neural network (WaveNet) for EEG artifact detection and classification. The model is powered by the wavelet decomposition block based on invertible neural network, which can extract signal features without information loss, and a tree generator for building wavelet tree structure automatically. They provide the model with good feature extraction capabilities and explainability. To evaluate the model’s performance more fairly, we introduce the base point level matching score (BASE) and the Event-Aligned Compensation Scoring (EACS) at the event level as two metrics for model performance evaluation. On the challenging Temple University EEG Artifact (TUAR) dataset, our model outperforms other baselines in terms of F1-score for both artifact detection and classification tasks. The case study also validates the model’s ability to offer explainability for predictions based on frequency band energy, suggesting potential applications in clinical diagnosis.