Received January 15, 2021, accepted January 30, 2021, date of publication February 3, 2021, date of current version

February 12, 2021.

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/ACCESS.2021.3056724

Convolutional Neural Network Utilizing

Error-Correcting Output Codes Support
Vector Machine for Classification of
Non-Severe Traumatic Brain Injury
From Electroencephalogram Signal
CHI QIN LAI 1 , (Member, IEEE), HAIDI IBRAHIM 1 , (Senior Member, IEEE),
JAFRI MALIN ABDULLAH 2,3 , AZLINDA AZMAN 4 ,
AND MOHD ZAID ABDULLAH 1 , (Member, IEEE)
1 School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Engineering Campus, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Nibong Tebal 14300, Malaysia
2 Brainand Behaviour Cluster, School of Medical Sciences, Health Campus, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Kota Bharu 16150, Malaysia
3 Department of Neurosciences, School of Medical Sciences, Health Campus, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Kota Bharu 16150, Malaysia
4 School of Social Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang 11800, Malaysia

Corresponding author: Haidi Ibrahim (haidi_ibrahim@ieee.org)

This work was supported by the Ministry of Higher Education (MoHE), Malaysia, through the Trans-Disciplinary Research
Grant Scheme (TRGS), under Grant 203/PELECT/6768002.

ABSTRACT A sudden blow or jolt to the human brain called traumatic brain injury (TBI) is one of the
most common injuries recorded in the health insurance claim. Generally, computed tomography (CT) or
magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is required to identify the trauma’s severity. Unfortunately, CT and MRI
equipment are bulky, expensive, and not always available, limiting their use in TBI detection. Therefore,
as an alternative, this study presents a novel classification architecture that can classify non-severe TBI
patients from healthy subjects by using resting-state electroencephalogram (EEG) as the input. The proposed
architecture employs a convolutional neural network (CNN), and error-correcting output codes support
vector machine (ECOC-SVM) to perform automated feature extraction and multi-class classification. In this
architecture, complex feature selection and extraction steps are avoided. The proposed architecture attained
a high-performance classification accuracy of 99.76%, potentially being used as a classification approach to
preventing healthcare insurance fraud. The proposed method is compared to existing studies in the literature.
The outcome from the comparisons indicates that the proposed method has outperformed the benchmarked
methods by presenting the highest classification accuracy and precision.

INDEX TERMS Accuracy, batch normalization, convolutional neural networks, electroencephalography,

data preparation.

I. INTRODUCTION care fraud detection plays an important role. Health insurance

Health insurance is an insurance policy covering part of or
the entire risk of an individual incurring medical expenses.
It provides coverage for payments of benefits as a result
of sickness or injury. However, many individuals misused
health insurance by committing health care fraud. Such a
scenario has caused a loss of tens of billions of dollars
annually to the insurance businesses [2]. Therefore, health
The associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and
approving it for publication was Ludovico Minati . workforce.
fraud happens when an individual or entity defrauds their
insurer or the insurance company, resulting in some unau-
thorized benefits to him or her accomplices, according to the
National Health Care Anti-Fraud Association [1]. To inves-
tigate brain injury claims, related insurance companies will
have to receive medical images of the brain from the hospital,
and subsequently, these images will be analyzed by medical
staff. Processing each of the neuroimaging results manu-
ally by medical professionals requires a high volume of the

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C. Q. Lai et al.: CNN Utilizing ECOC-SVM for Classification of Non-Severe TBI From EEG Signal
Generally, TBI can be divided into three categories, which
are severe TBI, moderate TBI, and mild TBI. Severe TBI
claims are more straightforward to be verified because
patients who suffer from severe TBI are often uncon-
scious [6]. On the other hand, identifying mild TBI or mod-
erate TBI without medical imaging analysis is challenging.
Mild TBI is among the most common neurologic condition,
and it is the least severe end of the continuum. Unfortunately,
biomarkers of the pathophysiologic effects of mild TBI are
still not established for clinical use. Thus, neuroimaging
technologies are needed for a reasonable justification for
mild TBI. Following a mild TBI, patients often experience
acute short-term symptoms such as headache, memory loss,
irritability, sensitivity to light, loss of concentration, and
fatigue [7]. However, the majority of those symptoms will be
resolved in two to three weeks. Usually, neuroimaging, such
as a CT scan, is required to justify mild TBI.
Because the severity of the moderate TBI is not perma-
nent, evaluating this type of TBI continues to be a challeng-
ing task. Patients with moderate TBI might encounter an
acute phase course where both inter-cranial and intra-cranial
trauma may induce secondary brain injury, elevating the
severity of TBI [8]. On the other hand, a study has shown
that patients with moderate TBI have fared less well. Approx-
imately 60% of the patients show positive recovery [9].
Nonetheless, screening for every submitted claim of mild and
moderate TBI patients using neuroimaging is not practical
because CT or MRI scans are relatively expensive. Besides,
these scanners are not always available in the hospitals [10].
Electroencephalogram (EEG) has been suggested as an
alternative to detect non-severe TBI [11]. Studies have found
that TBI biomarkers can be obtained by analyzing the
quantitative EEG (qEEG) of frequency bands of the sig-
nal (i.e., alpha, beta, theta, and gamma bands). They have
observed a significant reduction in mean alpha band fre-
quency and an increase in theta band activities in TBI patients,
but not in healthy subjects [12]–[15]. Therefore, these find-
ings indicate that EEG contains biomarkers for TBI.
A. RELATED WORK
As EEG has high temporal resolution and can reflect
brain activity, some experimental works have been carried
out by researchers to detect TBI from EEG [16], [17].
In work by Fisher et al. [18], EEG with the implantation
of cortical somatosensory evoked electroencephalographic
potentials (SSEPs) is used to detect and track, in real-
time, the neural electrophysiological abnormalities following
head injury in an animal model. It was found that ini-
tially, the amplitude of the signal increased over time but
dropped significantly after one hour of monitoring. Signif-
icant changes were observed in low-frequency components
and an increase of EEG entropy prior to 30 minutes post-
injury. Their experimental results suggested that cortical
SSEPs could be used to detect and monitor TBI.
On the other hand, McBride et al. [19] explored the visual
evoked potential EEG of TBI patients. In this study, TBI
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patients were required to perform memory tasks during EEG
recording. Event-related Tsallis entropies were extracted as
features to train a support vector machine (SVM) to classify
healthy subjects and TBI patients. Their results indicated the
potential of EEG for an early-stage TBI detection. A review
has been carried out by Rapp et al. [20] on the applications
of EEG on detecting TBI. From the literature, it is found that
active paradigms (i.e., task-related or stimulations exposure)
are often performed during EEG recording [21], [22].
Although active paradigms have shown promising results
in detecting TBI, it requires extensive setup time for the
EEG recording. These active paradigms are necessary to
assess the sensory pathways’ functionality and responses
of the human brain post-injury [23]. Accordingly, task-free
paradigms do not require subjects to be responsive to stimu-
lants’ tasks, making it a more accessible and better option for
TBI detection.
Two similar approaches are reviewed, which were used to
classify severe or mild TBI from healthy samples. In the work
of den Brink et al. [24], a Naive Bayes classifier was used
to classify EEG signals into two groups, which are severe
TBI patients and healthy samples. The classifier was trained
based on average power features from the beta band of each
electrode and EEG connectivity of delta, theta, and gamma
bands extracted from resting-state EEG. First, the signal was
pre-processed by applying a notch filter to remove the electri-
cal line noise, followed by a low-pass filter at 100Hz. Next,
a high-pass filter with a 0.5Hz cutoff is applied. After that,
the segments containing artifacts in the signal are manually
removed. The resulted signal of each subject is divided into
two-seconds segments. Subsequently, the three features were
extracted from the resultant segments. The three bands’ con-
nectivity is obtained by computing the correlation between
the log-transformed orthogonalized amplitude envelopes of
the delta, theta, and gamma bands [24]. This approach pre-
sented high classification accuracy. Even so, the performance
of their classifier heavily relies on the quality of the extracted
features. Thus, extensive exploration has to be done to select
informative features to ensure effective classifier learning.
McNerney et al. [25] used resting-state EEG and adaptive
boosting (AdaBoost) in classifying mild TBI. First, a band-
pass filter with cutoff frequency from 0.1 Hz to 100Hz is
applied to the input raw EEG. Subsequently, artifacts and
spikes are manually marked and removed from the signal.
After that, power spectral densities (PSD) of the delta, theta,
alpha, and gamma bands are extracted as features. The PSD
is calculated for signals of channel AF7 to FpZ and AF8 to
FpZ. The base-10 logarithm of the average PSD for each
frequency band are to train an AdaBoost classifier. AdaBoost
is a powerful classifier that creates a highly accurate clas-
sifier by combining several weak and inaccurate classifiers,
creating a classification model cascade. It is simple and
requires less tweaking of parameters to achieve high classifi-
cation results despite its sensitivity to noisy data and outliers.
Thus, to remove external noises, pre-processing becomes an
unavoidable stage in the work of McNerney et al. [25].
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 C. Q. Lai et al.: CNN Utilizing ECOC-SVM for Classification of Non-Severe TBI From EEG Signal
EEG recordings are usually contaminated with unwanted
elements such as noises and artifacts. Pre-processing is cru-
cial to remove these undesirable elements in the signal [26].
Feature extraction and selection are also time-consuming and
extensive. Furthermore, extracting features from resting-state
EEG can be even more challenging as it contains less infor-
mation than EEG with external stimulants. It is preferable for
machines to search and learn the data itself, especially the
implementation of resting-state EEG.
Convolutional neural network (CNN) is one of the common
methods used in development requiring classification [27].
CNN can overcome the complex design for feature extraction
and feature selection. CNN is a machine learning method
inspired by biological system [28], initially proposed for
image classification task [29]. Due to its great potential in
analyzing pixels per pixels of images, it is also applicable
in EEG analysis [30]–[35]. The data points of EEG can be
arranged in matrix form, similar to the matrix of pixels.
CNN’s topology is made of multilayer perception (MLP),
combining input layers, hidden layers, and the output layers.
The hidden layers include the convolutional layer and the
conventional back-propagation neural network dense layer.
The convolutional layers are made up of convolutional ker-
nels. These kernels carry learnable parameters that require
multiple iterations of learning and validation to determine
the optimum value empirically [36]. The convolutional layers
play the role of extracting important features from the input
matrix through the weighted learnable kernels [37]. Each
forward input of the matrix computes a feature map. The
convolutional layers learn to activate the feature maps when
the patterns of interest are detected in the input. Activated
feature maps are then down-sampled using the pooling layer
and further feed-forward to the next layer. A fully connected
layer (also known as a dense layer) is trained using the
feature map. The updates of the learnable parameters in the
CNN architecture implies back-propagation [29] and gradient
descent [38].
This article presents an EEG-based non-severe TBI clas-
sification model. Using EEG, the model can classify mild
TBI, moderate TBI, and healthy subjects, proposed as
a classification approach to evaluate the brain’s condi-
tion to prevent healthcare insurance fraud. CNN utilizing
the error-correcting output codes support vector machine
(ECOC-SVM) is selected as the machine learning approach
to overcome the complex stages of feature extraction and
selection.
This article is divided into six sections. Section I intro-
duces the paper. Then, Section II explains how the data
is acquired for this research. In Section III, the method-
ology of preparing the EEG signal into compatible input
for the proposed architecture is discussed. Then, Section IV
gives an overview of the proposed CNN architecture for
mild and moderate TBI classification. In Section V, perfor-
mance measures and training procedures used to evaluate
each experiment are presented. Next, Section VI presents
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the experiments conducted to design a novel classification
architecture. Lastly, Section VII concludes this article.
II. DATA ACQUISITION
The dataset used in this study is provided by Hospital Uni-
versiti Sains Malaysia, Kelantan, Malaysia. Ethical approval
has been obtained from Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM),
with reference number USM/JEPeM/15110486. A total
of 36 resting-state eyes-closed EEG recordings were col-
lected from 36 subjects. A matching of age between TBI
patients with healthy volunteers is used in this work. The age
range of all subjects in this study is between 18 to 65 years
old. Volunteers that contributed to this dataset are 12 mild
TBI patients (mean age = 30.95 ± 11.51), 12 moderate TBI
patients (mean age = 34.39 ± 15.79), and 12 healthy persons
(mean age = 35 ± 13.24).
In this study, all volunteers are male. Besides, all of the TBI
patients sustained nonsurgical mild or moderate TBI accord-
ing to the Glasgow Coma Scale (GCS), corresponding to a
score between 9-12 and 14-15, respectively. All of them suf-
fered an initial hit involving the left frontal-temporal-parietal
lobe as diagnosed by a brain CT scan. EEG has to be recorded
from the patients in a time range of a minimum of four
weeks to a maximum of ten weeks post-injury (mean time =
7 ± 2 weeks). Else the respective patient will be excluded
from this study. Each subject must be at a seated position dur-
ing the recording with eyes closed to obtain the resting-state
EEG data. There are no tasks or activities performed during
the data acquisition (i.e., task-free EEG recording). EEG is
continuously recorded for 350 seconds.
FIGURE 1. Arrangement of EEG channels on the WaveGuard EEG cap.
The EEG signals were continuously recorded using
64 electrodes mounted on a 64-channel WaveGuard EEG
cap. The channels’ placement is based on the international
10-10 EEG electrode system, which allows a high number of
electrode placements. The placement of electrodes is shown
in Figure 1. Therefore, the electrical activities from the scalp
will be recorded at 64-sites. However, CPz channel recording
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C. Q. Lai et al.: CNN Utilizing ECOC-SVM for Classification of Non-Severe TBI From EEG Signal
FIGURE 2. Overview of pre-processing procedure.
is excluded, leaving only 63 useful channels, because CPz
channel was used as an Electrooculography (EOG) channel
in this study. The ground electrode is located 10% anterior
to Fz, linked earlobes served as reference, and electrode
impedances are below five kOhm. EEG signals are recorded
using a programmable DC-coupled broadband SynAmps
amplifier. The EEG signals are amplified (gain 2500, accu-
racy 0.033/bit) with a recording range set of ±55 mV in
the DC to the 70-Hz frequency range. The EEG signals are
digitized using a sampling frequency Fs of 1000 Hz and
16-bit analog-to-digital converters. The digital EEG signal d
of channel i at discrete data point n, which is di [n], is obtained
from the analog EEG signal a at the corresponding channel.
This signal can be expressed as:
 
n where D is the downsampling factor. The downsampling
di [n] = ai (nT ) = ai (1)
Fs
The conversion of analog EEG signal to digital EEG signal
took place by taking samples (i.e., sampling) at each sampling
time interval, T (i.e., T = one millisecond) of the analog EEG
signal [54].
III. DATA PREPARATION AND PRE-PROCESSING
The recorded EEG signals were pre-processed to eliminate
unwanted elements, which will affect the training of the
proposed architecture (i.e., electrical line noises and arti-
facts). The pre-processing steps used in this study are shown
in Figure 2. First, because the electrical line frequency in
Malaysia is 50 Hz, a 50 Hz notch filter is applied to remove
electrical line noises from the EEG. Next, the resultant signal
undergoes a bandpass filter of 0.1 Hz and 100 Hz. It was
suggested that the frequency analysis of TBI is limited to a
frequency band between 0.1 Hz and 100 Hz, which includes
several useful sub-bands (i.e., delta, theta, alpha, beta, and
gamma bands) [20]. From the literature, it can be seen that
a bandpass filter of 0.1 Hz and 100 Hz is commonly used in
works related to TBI [39]. As physiology is best understood
for these frequency bands, using a bandpass filter of 0.1 Hz
and 100 Hz enabled TBI analysis to be carried out, focusing
on the useful frequency range.
The resultant signal then undergoes visual inspection of
artifacts. Segments containing artifacts were removed manu-
ally from the recording, and the previous part is concatenated
to the later part of the signal. EEG filtering and artifact
removal processes were placed before signal downsampling
to ensure there is no aliasing caused by high frequency.
It was recommended to place a lowpass filter to remove
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high frequency. However, it is optional as in the state-
of-art, a lowpass filter was not necessarily used before
downsampling [24].
Subsequently, the signal is downsampled from 1000 Hz to
100 Hz (i.e., using a downsampling factor D of 10). Down-
sampling is commonly used in the EEG processing task as
it can reduce the data time points and save up computational
power [24], [40], [41]. Besides, downsampling can free up
memories due to lesser time points, making this method
portable and less costly to implement. The downsampled
signal, xi [n], which is obtained from di [n] in Section II,
is defined as:
xi [n] = di [Dn] = di [10n] (2)
operates by decimating the signal by D, retaining only every
D-th sample, and eliminating the rest.
Next, the first 60 seconds of the recording are discarded
as they are usually contaminated by artifacts as subjects
are less calm at the early phase of the recording. From the
literature, most of the studies used 60 seconds of recordings.
This finding indicates that 60 seconds of recording is suf-
ficient for obtaining reliable diagnosis results using qEEG
features [39], [42]. Furthermore, the presence of more dis-
criminating characteristics of EEG is close at the beginning
of the recording [43]. Therefore, the next 60 seconds of the
recording is extracted from the recording and then divided
into 60 segments of one second.
As the input to the proposed method, the EEG is arranged
in the form of a matrix of the channel’s amplitude versus
time. The arrangement of the channels refers to the default
arrangement given by the WaveGuard EEG cap. Because
each segment is in one second, the matrix size of the EEG
is N × (Fs /D), where N is the number of channels, Fs is
the sampling frequency, and D is the downsampling factor
used in Equation (2). In this research, the matrix size is 63 ×
100 because the sampling rate of 1000Hz and downsampling
factor D of 10 are used, and the number of channels is 63.
As only 60 seconds from the EEG data is used, each EEG data
produces 60 segments stored as matrices. The components in
the matrix M of segment k is stored from the EEG data points
using the formula:
Mk [i, n] = xi [100(k − 1) + n + 6000] (3)
where k = 1, 2, 3, . . . , 60, i is the channel of the sampling
point (i.e., for this case, i = 1, 2, 3, . . . , 63), n is the sampling
point (i.e., for this case, n = 1, 2, 3, . . . , 100) and xi [n] is the
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 C. Q. Lai et al.: CNN Utilizing ECOC-SVM for Classification of Non-Severe TBI From EEG Signal
FIGURE 3. Proposed CNN ECOC-SVM Voting Ensembles Architecture.
amplitude of the sampling point of channel i at point n. Noted
that from Equation (3), segmentation started from the 6001-
th time point as the first 60 seconds were omitted. Therefore,
there are a total of 2160 EEG matrices (i.e., 60 one-second
segment × 12 patients × 3 classes).
IV. OVERVIEW OF PROPOSED CNN ECOC-SVM VOTING
ENSEMBLES ARCHITECTURE
The proposed architecture is divided into two parts. The
first part of the architecture performs feature extraction,
while the second part performs classification, which is shown
in Figure 3. The activations from each fully connected layer
are used to train three ECOC-SVM classifiers, respectively
(i.e., feature vector from Layer 3, 4, 5).
Error-correcting output codes (ECOC) is often used
together with SVM to perform multi-class classification,
as SVM alone only performs binary classification. ECOC
classification requires (i) a coding design to determine
the classes’ binary learners (i.e., SVM) to train on, and
(ii) a decoding scheme that defines the aggregation of the
final prediction of all the binary classifiers. The coding design
used in this study is a one-versus-one scheme, also known as
an exhaustive matrix scheme. The coding design is presented
in Table 1. In this work, 1 is the notation for positive class,
-1 is for negative class, while 0 is for ignoring the class.
For example, SVM 1 treats the healthy subject as the posi-
tive class and mild TBI subject as a negative class, whereas
moderate TBI class is omitted. The other SVM are trained
similarly.
Any classifier outputs a ‘‘0’’ or ‘‘1’’ when making a predic-
tion, generating a vector for output code. This output vector
is compared with each codeword in the matrix and the class
whose codeword has the closest distance to the output vector
is selected as the class to be predicted. The process of com-
bining the outputs of individual binary classifiers is known as
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TABLE 1. ECOC SVM coding design.
decoding. In this analysis, Hamming distance is used as the
decoding method to check for the minimum distance between
the prediction vector and the word code, which counts the
number of bits that differ. Both of the ECOC-SVM classifiers
trained are combined in parallel into a voting ensemble,
where the classification prediction decision is based on the
highest vote among the classifiers. The overall architecture is
presented in Figure 3.
Input to the CNN is a 63 × 100 matrix. In the convolution
layer, there are six 3 × 3 filters, sliding using stride length
of one. The activation function used for the convolutional
layer is a rectified linear unit (ReLU). Batch normaliza-
tion is placed after the convolutional layer. The convolution
layer’s output will be the same as the input matrix, as zero
paddings are performed before the convolution. Six 63 ×
100 feature maps are produced and directed to a 2 × 2
average pooling layer with a stride length of 1. The aver-
age pooling layer downsampled the feature maps, resulting
in six 31 × 50 feature maps. These six feature maps are
flattened into a long feature vector of size 9300 (i.e., 6 ×
31 × 50) and then directed into the fully connected (FC)
layers. By referring to Figure 3, Layer 3 and 4 are containing
128 neurons, producing a feature vector of 128 activations
respectively, whereas Layer 5 has a feature vector with three
activations. Features from Layer 3, 4, and 5 are used to train
three ECOC-SVM classifiers, respectively. The ECOC-SVM
classifiers were subsequently used to form a majority voting
ensemble algorithm.
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C. Q. Lai et al.: CNN Utilizing ECOC-SVM for Classification of Non-Severe TBI From EEG Signal
TABLE 2. Parameters and values.
Six parameters chosen for the proposed architecture are
shown in Table 2. The learning rate of 0.001 is selected and
remains constant throughout the training of CNN. L2 nor-
malization is used to perform batch normalization of the
convolutional layer. The mini-batch size for every iteration
is set at 16. The training iteration per epoch is fixed at 30.
L2 regularization, with a factor of 0.0005, is utilized to avoid
overfitting. The optimizer used for the back-propagation for
CNN training is adaptive moment estimation (ADAM).
V. TRAINING PROCEDURE AND PERFORMANCE
MEASURE
In the application of bioinformatics, a small dataset often
becomes an issue due to unforeseen restrictions, such as
the limited amount of patients. A small dataset caused the
evaluation of classifiers to be optimistic biases, inaccurate
in estimating its performance. Data augmentation can be
done to increase data, which is commonly seen in image
classification. However, augmentation of mild or moderate
TBI patient’s EEG can increase the classification error as
random noises may be added during augmentation.
The bootstrap method [44] is used in this work to overcome
small dataset issues in the evaluation of this proposed archi-
tecture. A bootstrap method is a resampling approach that
generates bootstrap sample sets used to quantify the uncer-
tainties associated with a machine learning method despite
using a small dataset. It can estimate a proposed machine
learning architecture using a small dataset by providing a
percentile confidence interval of the performance measures
(i.e., classification accuracy and precision). In short, the boot-
strap resampling approach allows the user to mimic the pro-
cess of obtaining a new dataset to estimate the performance
of the proposed architecture without generating new samples.
The bootstrapping concept is explained in three steps. First,
a random sample is selected from the original dataset. Next,
the random sample is added to the new dataset and then
returned to the original dataset. These two steps repeat until
the bootstrap sample set reaches the fixed number of samples.
In the machine learning approach, the size of the bootstrap
sample set generated is equal to the size of the original
dataset [45]. Therefore, certain samples may be represented
repetitively, while others may not be selected at all [45].
Bootstrapping is a useful approach as the trained machine
learning model’s prediction results using the bootstrap sam-
ple sets often present a Gaussian distribution. In our work,
bootstrap resampling is performed on all 36 subjects before
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segmentation is done, and the resampling sample size is set
to 36.
Efron suggested that 250 iterations can give useful per-
centile intervals [44]. Therefore, to obtain the optimal
parameters and the design of the proposed architecture,
250 iterations of the resampled bootstrap sample set are
used. To achieve a more ambitious measure of confidence
intervals, Efron suggested a minimum of 1000 iterations of
the resampled bootstrap sample set [44]. Thus, in the eval-
uation of the final proposed architecture, 2000 iterations of
bootstrap resampling are performed. 3-fold cross-validation
is performed on each bootstrap sample. From the cross-
validation, two quantitative evaluations are recorded for each
generated bootstrap sample set (i.e., accuracy and precision).
Box plots were plotted for the evaluation of the results.
VI. EXPERIMENTS, RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS
Experiments have been done using a simple hill-climbing
approach to determine the optimum parameters and archi-
tecture. The search stopped when the performance shows a
downtrend, and the parameter with the best performance is
selected. Figure 4 shows the flow of the experiments that
were conducted to design the proposed architecture. There
are no clear guidelines for the design and parameter set up
of CNN architecture. For this study, the first two parameters
that are determined are the learning rate and mini-batch size.
This decision is to ensure effective learning before fine-tuning
other parameters. If the optimum learning rate and mini-batch
size were not obtained beforehand, architecture learning
would be affected. Thus, the experiments’ flow began with
the search of optimum learning rate and mini-batch size,
subsequently followed by fine-tuning the design of architec-
ture. As the experiments’ input to determine the optimum
architecture, raw EEG data underwent downsampling and
segmentation procedure mentioned in Equation (2) and (3),
respectively. The final architecture was evaluated with both
raw and pre-processed EEG to explore the potential of CNN
extracting quality features from the raw EEG signal.
There are eight subsections in the following section.
Section VI-A discussed the experiments conducted to select
the optimum learning rate. Section VI-B presents the selec-
tions of mini-batch size for the training of CNN. Next,
Section VI-C discusses the experiments conducted to deter-
mine the optimal number of convolutional layers.
Experiments have been done to determine the suitable
type of pooling layer and are discussed in Section VI-D.
Section VI-E presents experiments conducted to select the
optimum number of filters and filter size used in the convolu-
tional layer. Section VI-F presents experiments to determine
the optimum architecture of the fully connected layer.
Two optimizers that are commonly used in the state-of-art
are stochastic gradient descent (SGD) and ADAM. Experi-
ments have been conducted to determine the best optimizers.
These experiments are presented in Section VI-G together
with its results. In Section VI-H, experiments conducted to
construct and evaluate the final proposed architecture are
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 C. Q. Lai et al.: CNN Utilizing ECOC-SVM for Classification of Non-Severe TBI From EEG Signal
FIGURE 4. Flowchart of the experiments to determine the proposed
architecture.
presented and discussed in detail. Pre-processing has always
been one of the crucial stages in determining the input quality
to CNN. CNN carries the potential to extract features by
ignoring the unwanted elements selectively. Experiments are
conducted using pre-processed data and downsampled raw
data on the final architecture later in Section VI-H. Finally,
the proposed architecture is compared to similar works in
literature, as well as our previous studies in Section VI-I.
A. SELECTION OF OPTIMUM LEARNING RATE
The learning rate is an important parameter that determines
the update step of learnable weights for backpropagation
learning [46]. When the learning rate is too huge, the gradient
descent can recklessly increase rather than decrease the train-
ing error. On the other hand, using a learning rate that is too
small can cause slow training and might cause invariable high
training errors. Therefore, determining the optimum learning
rate is crucial to optimize the search for the minimum point
of loss in backpropagation learning.
The current study shows that a good learning rate can be
estimated by initiating a larger learning rate and decreas-
ing it at each iteration using 0.1 as a starting point [47].
Experiments are carried out by varying the learning rate
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using an initial CNN with one convolutional layer with six
5 × 5 filters, one 2 × 2 max-pooling layer, 32 mini-batch
sizes, and the ADAM optimizer. The learning rates used are
0.1, 0.01, 0.001 and 0.0001 respectively.
The accuracy and precision of each learning rate are shown
in Figure 5. From Figure 5(a), results show that the architec-
ture’s accuracy increased (i.e., based on the median accuracy)
as the learning rate decreased from 0.1 to 0.001 and dropped
when the learning rate falls to 0.0001. From Figure 5(b),
in terms of the distribution of the obtained precision val-
ues, the learning rate of 0.001 is also showing the best
performance.
The training times for CNN using different learning rates
are also recorded and shown in Figure 6. It can be seen
that the training time increased when the learning rate
decreased. By tolerating some learning time, the learning rate
of 0.001 showed the best performance; thus, it will be used as
one of the parameters in designing the proposed architecture.
B. SELECTION OF OPTIMUM MINI BATCH SIZE
In CNN learning, the training set is divided into numbers of
mini-batches, each consisting of a small number of training
samples. The mini-batch size controls the accuracy of the
estimate of the error gradient during CNN training. The error
gradient is used to update the CNN model weights, and the
process repeats.
A study has shown that using a mini-batch size that is too
large can cause significant degradation in the quality of the
trained CNN model due to the lack of generalization ability
and converge to a sharp minimum [48]. Thus, the optimum
mini-batch size has to be found to ensure a better convergence
rate and better stability of the CNN training [46].
Mini batch size of 32 has been introduced as the default
value based on a recommendation by some studies [47], [49].
However, to explore the smaller mini-batch size’s per-
formance, 8 is selected as the starting point rather than
32. Experiments were conducted using 8, 16, 32, 64, and
128 mini-batch sizes to determine the optimum value using
a CNN architecture with one convolutional layer of six
5 × 5 filters, one 2 × 2 max-pooling layer, the learning rate
of 0.001 and an ADAM optimizer. Figure 7(a) and (b) show
their accuracy and precision, respectively. From this figure,
it is shown that mini-batch size of 16 gave the best perfor-
mance in terms of accuracy and precision.
C. SELECTION OF OPTIMUM NUMBER OF CONVOLUTION
LAYER
The convolution layer of a CNN network performs unsu-
pervised feature extraction through convolution operation.
Studies have shown CNN can capture the spatial and tem-
poral dependencies without neglecting the pixel dependen-
cies throughout and has shown high performance in image
applications. Thus, the convolution layer advances the feature
extraction stage from EEG as it can extract the correlation
between channels of the EEG by sliding across the input using
filters.
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FIGURE 5. a) Accuracy for Various Learning Rate b) Precision for Various Learning Rate.
FIGURE 6. Training time by different learning rate.
EEG is arranged in two-dimensional (i.e., channels × data
points), similar to images. Performing convolution operation
to the signal can extract data points dependencies as features.
Zero-padding is performed before convolution operation to
preserve features existing at the edges of the EEG matrix.
This approach helps to preserve the original input size, which
can reduce information lost during feature extraction.
Experiments have been conducted by increasing the num-
ber of the convolutional layer (i.e., one to three) with six
5 × 5 filters in a CNN architecture with one 2 ×
2 max-pooling layer, 16 mini-batch sizes, 0.001 learning rate,
and the ADAM optimizer. Accuracy and precision for each
CNN architecture with different number of the convolutional
layer are shown in Figure 8.
As shown in Figure 8, the CNN architecture with one
convolutional layer outperformed the rest of the compared
multi-convolutional layer CNN. In further comparison, it can
be seen that there is a performance dip when the convolutional
layer is increased to two layers.
Adding more convolution layers beyond a certain threshold
can lead to the extraction of irregularities in the data, causing
performance degradation. Therefore, one convolutional layer
is sufficient to extract feature maps containing informative
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features. From the experiment outcome, a CNN with one
convolutional layer is selected.
D. SELECTION OF POOLING TYPE
The pooling layer is commonly placed after the convolutional
layer to reduce the dimension of feature map to help reduce
computational load and processing time. The pooling layer
works by sliding an n × n kernel through the resulting feature
map from the previous convolutional layer, where n is the size
of the kernel. Two types of pooling layers are commonly used
(i.e., max pooling and average pooling). In the max pooling
operation, the kernel will take the maximum value within the
n × n kernel as the output. On the other hand, the average
pooling operation calculated the kernel’s average value then
stored in the output matrix.
To investigate the suitable type of pooling, two experiments
were conducted separately using max pooling and average
pooling of 2 × 2 kernel size using CNN architecture made up
of one convolutional layer with six 5×5 filters, 0.001 learning
rate, and a mini-batch size of 16. In Figure 9, architecture
with an average pooling layer performed slightly better than
the one with the max-pooling layer, indicating that average
pooling is a better option in this EEG application.
Max pooling operation works by obtaining extreme values.
However, in the EEG application, extreme input values usu-
ally represent noises, artifacts, and peaks. These unwanted
elements caused inaccurate classification. On the other hand,
average pooling takes into account all values in the kernel,
thus retaining most information.
E. SELECTION OF OPTIMUM FILTER SIZE AND NUMBER
OF FILTERS
Two parameters determine the convolution process, the num-
ber of filters in the convolutional layer, and the filter size.
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FIGURE 7. a) Accuracy for Various Mini Batch Size b) Precision for Various Mini Batch Size.

FIGURE 8. a) Accuracy for Various Number of Convolutional Layer b) Precision for Various Number of
Convolutional Layer.

The number of filters in the convolutional layer determines
the numbers of resultant feature maps, while the filter size is
the parameter that determine the quality of the feature map
(i.e., smaller filter size extract finer features). Experiments
were conducted using different filter sizes with different
numbers of filters in the convolutional layer, using a CNN
architecture made up of one convolutional layer, one 2 ×
2 average pooling layer, and one 3 neurons FC layer with a
mini-batch size of 16, a learning rate of 0.001, and an ADAM
optimizer, which is the combined outcomes from previous
experiments.
There are three filter sizes evaluated (i.e., 3 × 3, 5 × 5
and 7 × 7). Experiments conducted using 3 × 3 filters are
shown in Figure 10. The performance of the architecture
improved when the number of 3 × 3 filters is increased
from one filter to four filters. However, further increasing
the number of 3 × 3 filters to five shown degradation in
performance measures. Experiments were further conducted
using six and seven 3 × 3 filters, respectively. It was shown
that six 3×3 filters performed better than the architecture with
four 3 × 3 filters. On the other hand, seven 3 × 3 filters cause
degradation.
Experiments were repeated using 5 × 5 filter. The results
are presented in Figure 11. When the number of 5×5 filters is
increased to two, the performance is improved. Experiments
were further conducted using three to eight 5 × 5 filter,

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FIGURE 9. a) Accuracy for Different Pooling Type b) Precision for Different Pooling Type.

FIGURE 10. a) Accuracy for Different Number of 3 × 3 Filter b) Precision for Different Number of 3 × 3 Filter.

respectively. As the number of filters is increased to four,
the performance of architecture dropped. However, there is
a slight improvement when the number of filters increased
from five to seven. When eight 5 × 5 filters were used,
the architecture’s performance worsened.
Experiments have been conducted using the same CNN
architecture with 7 × 7 filters and the results were presented
in Figure 12. Increment of the number of 7 × 7 filters to two
filters improved the performance of architecture. Neverthe-
less, architecture using three and four 7 × 7 filters deflated
the result.
From the results, CNN architecture with six 3 × 3 filters
performed the best. As the number of filters increased above
a threshold, the performance of the architecture worsen. This
result happens because the extra feature maps extracted did
not supply useful features to the architecture learning. Extra
non-informative features can confuse architecture learning
and cause a dip in performance.
This result suggested six feature maps extracted by the six
3 × 3 filters presented finer and more informative features
that benefit the architecture learning. On the other hand,
architecture with a 7×7 filter under-performing indicated the
filter size is too large that it missed out too many fine features.
The outcome from the conducted experiments, six 3 × 3
filters are used for the convolutional layer in the proposed
architecture.

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FIGURE 11. a) Accuracy for Different Number of 5 × 5 Filter b) Precision for Different Number of 5 × 5 Filter.

FIGURE 12. a) Accuracy for Different Number of 7 × 7 Filter b) Precision for Different Number of 7 × 7 Filter.

F. SELECTION OF OPTIMUM FULLY CONNECTED LAYER
ARCHITECTURE
The role of the fully connected (FC) layer is to take the
output from the last pooling layer then perform classification.
There are no guidelines for the architecture of FC layers for
CNN (i.e., number of layers and neurons for each layer).
Nine possible FC layer architectures were tested with CNN
using the best parameters determined (i.e., one convolutional
layer with six 3 × 3 filters, one 2 × 2 average pooling layer,
the mini-batch size of 16, the learning rate of 0.001, and the
ADAM optimizer).
The results of this experiment are presented in Figure 13.
Firstly, one FC layer with three neurons was tested with
the defined CNN architecture. Next, an additional layer of
FC with 32 neurons was added above the first FC. The
experiment was repeated by changing the number of neurons
for the second FC layer with 64, 128, and 256 neurons,
respectively.
From Figure 13, the results indicated an increasing number
of neurons from 32 to 128 neurons on the second FC layer
improved the CNN architecture’s performance. However,
a further increment of the neurons for the second FC layer
degraded the architecture’s performance.
The next experiment was conducted by using three FC
layers (i.e., two FC layers with 128 neurons and one FC
layer with three neurons). It was shown that three FC layers

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FIGURE 13. a) Accuracy for Various FC architecture for CNN b) Precision for Various FC architecture for CNN.
architecture performed worst than the architecture with one
128 neurons FC layer and three neurons FC layer. Subse-
quently, a CNN architecture with three 128 neurons FC layers
and one three neurons FC layer were tested, and it was found
this setup did not improve the performance of the previous
architecture.
By further investigation, CNN architecture with four
128 neurons FC layers and one 3 neurons FC layer were
tested. The results further worsened compared to the archi-
tecture with three 128 neurons FC layers and one 3 neurons
FC layer. The architecture’s performance did not improve but
dropped in comparison to the previous architecture.
The outcome from all the conducted experiments in this
section induced that the CNN architecture with one 128 neu-
rons FC layer and one 3 neurons FC layer performed the
best. Architectures with FC consisting of too few neurons
(i.e., 32 and 64 ) caused the network’s low learning capability
and resulted in underfitting. The lower number of neurons
in the FC layer failed to detect and learn from the flattened
feature map. This scenario can also be seen in the architecture
of 1 FC layer with three neurons.
On the other hand, using too many neurons in the FC layers
result in overfitting. Overfitting occurred when the archi-
tecture took up too much information processing capacity.
Thus, the limited amount of information in the training set is
insufficient to fit all the neurons. Indication of overfitting can
be seen in the architecture with one 256 neurons FC layer and
one 3 neurons FC layer. Its performance degraded compared
to the architecture with only 128 neurons FC layer and one
3 neurons FC layer.
Besides, CNN architecture with more than 3 FC layers is
also one of the overfitting evidence, where the performance
further reduced compared to the CNN architecture with 3 FC
layers. In summary, the two best-performed architectures
used in the subsequent experiments to facilitate the design
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of the proposed architecture are (i) architecture with one
128 neurons FC layer and one three neurons FC layers;
and (ii) architecture with two 128 neurons FC layers and one
3 neurons FC layer.
G. SELECTION OF OPTIMIZER FOR BACKPROPAGATION
Two optimizers are evaluated in this study (i.e., the stochas-
tic gradient descent (SGD) with momentum and adaptive
moment estimation (ADAM)). Both of these optimizers were
evaluated using CNN architecture made up of one convo-
lutional layer with six 3 × 3 filters, one 2 × 2 average
pooling layer, one 128 neurons FC layers, and one 3 neu-
rons FC layer with a mini-batch size of 16 and learning
rate of 0.001. Based on the results in Figure 14, ADAM
performed better than SGD in all terms of performance mea-
sures. Both optimizers presented a low standard deviation
and a small range of confidence intervals, indicating a stable
performance.
The original SGD without momentum oscillate along the
steepest descent path towards the optimum, making the archi-
tecture harder to finalize the local minima. Adding a momen-
tum term to the weights update can overcome this issue
by adding momentum in the direction of consistent gradi-
ents and discard the momentum if gradients are in opposite
directions [51]. SGD with momentum shows comparable
performance and converges faster than the original SGD as
bigger steps are taken towards the same direction following
the momentum.
However, in this study, it was observed that SGD with
momentum present lower performance than ADAM. SGD
with momentum solved the issue of oscillation, but it can
easily overshoot the local minima due to the large steps taken
following the momentum. It can result in swinging back
and forth between the local minima due to the overflow of
momentum and hardly achieve the local minima.
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FIGURE 14. a) Accuracy for Different Optimizer b) Precision for Different Optimizer.
On the other hand, ADAM is an optimizer that is a combi-
nation of SGD with momentum and root mean square propa-
gation (RMSProp). Therefore, ADAM carries the advantage
of momentum solving the problem of noisy oscillation and
also the strong side of RMSProp that changes the step size by
adapting to the gradient.
Based on the experimental results, advantages carried by
ADAM are useful to enable efficient architecture learning.
Computing a unique learning rate for each weight and bias
becomes a more compatible method for this study, enhancing
the architecture’s learning. Hence, ADAM is selected as the
optimizer for the proposed architecture.
H. CONSTRUCTION OF PROPOSED ARCHITECTURE
1) EVALUATION OF POTENTIAL ARCHITECTURES
From all the conducted experiments, two potential architec-
tures are selected as the proposed architecture. Both of the
potential architectures are summarized in Table 3. The main
difference between Architecture 1 and 2 is the number of
FC layer. Architecture 1 has two FC layers with 128 and
3 neurons, respectively, while Architecture 2 has three FC
layers with two of them with 128 neurons and one with
3 neurons, respectively.
TABLE 3. Potential CNN Architectures.
However, both architectures can only achieve performance
with the classification accuracy of 54.16% and 53.43%,
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respectively. The performance suggested SoftMax classifier
at the output of the last FC layer did not perform well in clas-
sification. Hence, it becomes a motivation to propose SVM
to replace the SoftMax classifier. The error-correcting output
coding (ECOC) algorithm is introduced to combined with
SVM to perform multi-class classification. SVM is a robust
and powerful binary classifier due to its ability to perform
class separation and the kernel space facilities. Combining
SVM with the ECOC algorithm can efficiently handle the
multi-class problem by utilizing the binary set of ECOC with
suitable coding rules to achieve a non-linear classification
while reducing the trained models’ bias and variance.
To make full use of the ECOC-SVM, activations from
the fully connected layers are used as feature vectors. Three
experiments were first conducted using architecture 1. First,
Architecture 1 is trained according to the defined training
procedure. Activations from each of the fully connected lay-
ers in the architecture (i.e., from Table 3, Layer 3, and
4) are extracted as features, respectively. The results of the
three experiments are presented in Figure 15. Two experi-
ments were conducted using features from Layer 3 and Layer
4 to train two ECOC-SVM separately. In contrast, the third
experiment was conducted using the concatenation of fea-
tures from Layer 3 and Layer 4 to train an ECOC-SVM
classifier.
From Figure 15, each trained ECOC-SVM showed
improvement compared to the architecture 1 using SoftMax
as the classification tool. ECOC-SVM classifier trained using
feature vector from Layer 3, Layer 4, and a combination of
features from Layer 3 and 4 achieved classification accuracy
above 68%. The features extracted from each FC layer is the
linear combination of the feature vector from the previous
layer and trainable weights plus a bias term. Therefore, each
EEG input will be assigned to a unique weight and bias
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FIGURE 15. a) Accuracy for the Performance of Different ECOC SVM Models Using Features From Different
Layer of Architecture 1 b) Precision for the Performance of Different ECOC SVM Models Using Features From
Different Layer of Architecture 1.
via backpropagation that strongly correlates to its respective
classes.
The feature vector from Layer 3 performed slightly lower
than others because the input to the layer is the flattened
feature map from the last average pooling layer (i.e., Layer 2),
which is a low-level feature. As the features passed through
the rest of the FC layers, the low-level features will eventually
build up into higher-level features, describing the input EEG
better. Each neuron in the FC layer received inputs from every
neuron of the previous layer. Thus, each neuron contained
information from the previous feature vector, in which the
end product is the summation of all low-level features. From
Figure 15, it can be seen that feature vector extracted from
Layer 4 at a higher level can provide sufficient information
for a robust classifier training. Among three experiments
conducted, feature fusion of Layer 3 and 4 present the highest
performance with the classification accuracy of 69.91% and
the precision of 68.12%. Feature vectors result from the
combination carried distinct information from both Layer
3 and 4, resulting in better training of an ECOC-SVM model.
However, feature vector from the respective FC layer may
contain repeated information passed to the next FC layer.
Therefore, there is a chance of information redundancy,
which may confuse the training of architecture.
Hence, an experiment was conducted using architecture 2.
Features were extracted from the FC layers (i.e., Layer 3, 4,
and 5) and trained three ECOC-SVM, respectively. A major-
ity voting ensembles algorithm was developed using the
trained ECOC-SVM classifiers. For the classification predic-
tion output decision, the majority decision from the respective
ECOC-SVM will be the final output. The results from the
experiment are presented in Figure 16. Compared to the
feature fusion used in CNN architecture 1, the ECOC-SVM
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ensemble architecture under-performed with the classifica-
tion accuracy of 65.42% and the precision of 66.78%. This
outcome is an indication that the quality of the trained
ECOC-SVM models is not good enough to result in robust
voting, causing inaccurate classification decisions.
All ECOC-SVM classifiers presented in Figure 15 and
Figure 16 are able to reach classification accuracy that are
above 65%. This result indicates that ECOC-SVM classifier
that learns from FC layers’ activations performs better than
the CNN Architecture 1 and 2.
2) EFFECT OF PRE-PROCESSING
Note that the input EEG to all conducted experiments
previously did not undergo any pre-processing. Therefore,
to investigate the effect of pre-processing on the archi-
tecture’s performance, the experiments are repeated using
pre-processed EEG data. The pre-processing procedure is
described in Section III. Results from the experiment are
presented in Figure 17.
From Figure 17, all the ECOC-SVM trained using the
pre-processed data improved drastically compared to those
trained with raw EEG data. All the performance measures
increased to 99% and above, indicating efficient training
using pre-processed data. The pre-processing procedure
used in this study efficiently removed unwanted elements
(i.e., noises, artifacts, extreme values), which may confuse
the learning process of the architecture.
Figure 17 shows that the CNN ECOC-SVM majority
voting ensembles architecture gives the best performance,
presenting a high classification accuracy of 99.79% and
the precision of 99.73%. The CNN ECOC-SVM major-
ity voting ensembles architecture also presents a low stan-
dard deviation for the 250 bootstrap resampling runs,
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FIGURE 16. a) Accuracy for the Performance of ECOC-SVM Majority Voting Ensembles Using Features From
Layer 3, 4 and 5 of Architecture 2 b) Precision for the Performance of ECOC-SVM Majority Voting Ensembles
Using Features From Layer 3, 4 and 5 of Architecture 2.

FIGURE 17. a) Accuracy for the Performance of Different ECOC-SVM Using Features of Pre-processing EEG From
FC layers of Architecture 1 and ECOC-SVM Majority Ensembles From FC layers of Architecture 2 b) Precision for
the Performance of Different ECOC-SVM Using Features of Pre-processing EEG From FC layers of Architecture
1 and ECOC-SVM Majority Ensembles From FC layers of Architecture 2.

indicating this architecture has stable performance. Undergo-
ing pre-processing, a clean EEG data can provide informa-
tive features without confusing the learning process, hence
developed quality ECOC-SVM classifiers that can make
accurate votings and decision-making.
The advantage of CNN ECOC-SVM majority voting
ensembles architecture is that each of the ECOC-SVM clas-
sifiers is combined to cover different regions of competence
(i.e., correcting wrong predictions of each other), which indi-
cates that this architecture has stable performance. Stronger
ECOC-SVM classifiers performed well in error correction,
aiding the weaker classifiers to produce better prediction
performance. Stabilization of the architecture can be seen by
highlighting the high precision (i.e., 99.73%).
3) EVALUATION OF FINAL ARCHITECTURE
By referring to the results of the conducted experiments,
the final architecture proposed is a CNN ECOC-SVM
majority voting ensembles by ensemble three ECOC-SVM
classifiers trained by activations from the FC layers of
Architecture 2 respectively. The proposed architecture’s
optimum parameters were determined via experiments

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FIGURE 18. a) Accuracy for the Performance of 250 and 2000 Bootstrap Resampling for proposed CNN
ECOC-SVM Voting Ensembles Architecture 2 b) Precision for the Performance of 250 and 2000 Bootstrap
Resampling for proposed CNN ECOC-SVM Voting Ensembles Architecture.

(i.e., the learning rate of 0.001, 16 mini-batch sizes, and
ADAM optimizer). For the proposed architecture to perform
at its best, pre-processing has to be done on the input EEG
signal, as described in Section III. The proposed architecture
shows high-performance measures and stability. To further
assure the high performance of the proposed architecture,
the experiment is repeated using 2000 bootstrap resampling
to obtain an ambitious measure of CI for all the perfor-
mance measures with a pre-processed EEG signal. The results
are presented in Figure 18, together with the experiment
done using 250 bootstrap resampling. There are small decre-
ments in performance measures of the architecture conducted
using 2000 bootstrap resampling (i.e., the classification accu-
racy of 99.76% and the precision of 99.72%). Again, these
results strengthen the robust performance of this proposed
architecture.
I. COMPARISON OF THE PROPOSED METHOD WITH
EXISTING WORKS
The proposed method is compared with two similar
existing methods [24], [25], and two of our previous
works [52], [53]. The first method for comparison is the
work by den Brink et al. [24], which uses task-free EEG and
Naive Bayes classifier for TBI classification. The second
method compared was proposed by McNerney et al. [25]
that uses the AdaBoost classifier. From our previous
works [52], [53], the same pre-processing procedure pre-
sented in Section III was used to pre-process the data. Alpha
band power and theta power spectral density (PSD) were
extracted to train the SVM classifier. For a fair compari-
son, the same dataset, training procedure, and performance
measure are used (i.e., as presented in Section V) for all
the compared methods. The performance of each of the
methods and the proposed CNN ECOC-SVM are presented
in Table 4.
TABLE 4. Accuracy and Precision for the Performance existing works and
proposed CNN ECOC-SVM Voting Ensembles Architecture.
Having established the features extracted from the fre-
quency bands can provide important information dur-
ing the training on the classifier, den Brink et al. [24],
McNerney et al. [25] and our previous works performed fea-
ture extractions relying on the frequency bands. On the other
hand, for this paper’s proposed method, the pre-processed
signal did not undergo any feature extraction. The EEG is
arranged in matrix form and fed to the input of the CNN topol-
ogy. The convolution layers performed feature extraction to
obtain distinct features from the input. The convolution layers
made up of learnable kernels are aimed at extracting local
features from the input. The feature extraction takes place in
the convolution layers started by extracting low-level features
and subsequently progressed to extract higher-level features.
Results showed that the proposed architecture outper-
formed the other two methods with the classification accuracy
of 99.76% and the precision of 99.72%. Naive Bayes presents
a comparable performance (i.e., the classification accuracy
of 97.01%). However, to ensure such high performance,
pre-processing and feature extraction have to be performed to
ensure quality features can be extracted. On the other hand,

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the Adaboost classifier can only present the classification
accuracy of 62.68 %.
Naive Bayes made assumptions that each feature is inde-
pendent of each other, ignoring the dependency between EEG
channels. It caused the correlations between channels to be
neglected, which can cause information lost in classifier train-
ing. Thus, the proposed method that makes use of CNN can
overcome the shortcoming of Naive Bayes. The AdaBoost
classifier is a machine learning method that requires less
tweaking of parameters and is easy to use. However, it is
sensitive to noises and outliers, which is unavoidable in EEG
recordings. More efforts have to be done to ensure noises
and artifacts to be removed to ensure an effective classifier
training. The proposed method only has to undergo simple
bandpass filtering and to remove segments containing arti-
facts, yet presents a performance that is near to 100%
In comparison to our previous works [52], [53], alpha band
power, and theta band power spectral density (PSD) were
extracted from the EEG as features to train ECOC-SVM
classifiers. However, it has shown a lower classification than
the proposed method. Alpha band power and theta PSD can
be included as one of the features for moderate TBI classi-
fication, but using alpha band power or theta PSD alone is
insufficient. Other features have to be extracted to provide
sufficient information to train an SVM, like correlation coef-
ficient, phase difference, and more.
VII. CONCLUSION
In this article, the final proposed architecture and param-
eters are obtained by conducting extensive experiments.
To obtain the parameters and proposed architecture, 250 boot-
strap resampling was performed for each of the experiments.
3-fold cross-validation was used on the downsampled raw
EEG to conduct the experiments. Parameters that are suc-
cessfully determined are 0.001 learning rate, mini-batch size
of 16, one convolutional layer with two 5×5 filters, one 2×2
average pooling layer, two FC layer with 128 neurons, and
one FC layer with three neurons.
Activations from FC layers are used to train three
ECOC-SVM classifiers respectively and were connected in
parallel to form a high-performance majority voting ensem-
ble algorithm for the classification of non-severe TBI and
healthy subjects. It was shown that ECOC-SVM classi-
fier trained using FC layer activations performs better than
conventional CNN architectures that utilize SoftMax for
non-severe TBI classification. The effect of pre-processing
was explored using the proposed architecture, and it was
found that pre-processed EEG improves performance archi-
tecture than using raw EEG.
Proposed novel CNN ECOC-SVM voting ensem-
bles architecture that uses pre-processed EEG presents
high-performance measures, and its performance is reassured
using 2000 bootstrap resampling and 3-fold cross-validation.
The proposed CNN ECOC-SVM majority voting ensemble
architecture presents high performance with the classification
accuracy of 99.76% and the precision of 99.72%. In addition,
24962
the proposed method was shown to outperform drastically
similar works in the literature, as well as our previous studies.
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CHI QIN LAI (Member, IEEE) received the
B.Eng. degree in electrical and electronic engi-
neering and the master’s degree in image process-
ing and machine learning from Universiti Sains
Malaysia, Malaysia, in 2016, where he is cur-
rently pursuing the Ph.D. degree. He joined Intel
as a Product Development Engineer. His research
interests include machine learning and biomedical
signal processing and analysis.
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 C. Q. Lai et al.: CNN Utilizing ECOC-SVM for Classification of Non-Severe TBI From EEG Signal
HAIDI IBRAHIM (Senior Member, IEEE)
received the B.Eng. degree in electrical and elec-
tronic engineering from Universiti Sains Malaysia,
Malaysia, and the Ph.D. degree in image pro-
cessing from the Centre for Vision, Speech and
Signal Processing (CVSSP), University of Surrey,
U.K., in 2005. His research interests include digital
image and signal processing and analysis.
JAFRI MALIN ABDULLAH received the M.D.
degree from the School of Medical Sciences, Uni-
versity Sains Malaysia, in 1986, and the Diplomate
Certification of specialization in neurosurgery and
the Ph.D. degree (magna cum laude) from the
University of Ghent, Belgium, in 1994 and 1995,
respectively. He studied at Sekolah Menengah
Sains Bukit Mertajam and SMS Kelantan,
Pengkalan Chepa and the Leederville Technical
College, Perth, Western Australia, and the Univer-
sity of Western Australia. He was previously the Director of P3Neuro, The
Center for Neuroscience Services and Research, University Sains Malaysia,
from 2013 to 2018. He is currently the Director of the Brain Behaviour
Cluster, School of Medical Sciences, USM. His research interests include
new treatments in the field of aging brain cells in vivo and in vitro, aging brain
and brain trauma, human pluripotential stem cells, neurooncology, medicinal
chemistry in the field of biodegradable wafer antibiotics, drugs for movement
disorders, CNS tuberculosis, epilepsy and pain, as well as ethnopharmacol-
ogy. He is a member of the National STEM Movement and is working with
the Ministry of Education, USM, and UPSI on the STEM Comic Project.
He is a Fellow of the Academy Science Malaysia, the American College of
Surgeons, the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, the Royal Society
of Medicine, U.K., the World Federation of Neurosurgical Societies, and
the American Association of Neurological Surgeons. He was awarded the
prestigious Young National Malaysian Scientist Award in 1999 and the Top
Research Scientist Award, Academy Science Malaysia, in 2013, by the Prime
Minister of that period.
24964
AZLINDA AZMAN received the Ph.D. degree
in clinical social work from New York Univer-
sity. She was a Fulbright Scholar with New York
University. She is currently a Professor in social
work and the Dean of the School of Social Sci-
ences, Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM), Penang,
Malaysia. She is also the Convenor of the AIDS
Action and Research Group (AARG), USM.
Her research interests include social work edu-
cation/curriculum, theory and methods in social
work, and social work research. Her research interests also include poverty,
HIV/AIDS, and drug related issues.
MOHD ZAID ABDULLAH (Member, IEEE)
received the B.App.Sc. degree in electronic from
Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM), in 1986, and
the M.Sc. degree in instrument design and applica-
tion and the Ph.D. degree in electrical impedance
tomography from the Institute of Science and
Technology, The University of Manchester, U.K.,
in 1989 and 1993, respectively. He joined Hitachi
Semiconductor, Malaysia, as a Test Engineer. He is
currently a Lecturer and a Professor with USM’s
School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering. He has published numerous
research articles in international journals and conference proceedings. His
research interests include microwave tomography, digital image processing,
computer vision, and ultra-wide band sensing. One of his papers was awarded
The Senior Moulton Medal for the Best Article published by the Institute of
Chemical Engineering, in 2002.
VOLUME 9, 2021