Jahromy Fatemeh Zareayan
Biomedical Engineering Department, School of Electrical Engineering Iran University of Science and Technology (IUST), Tehran, Iran.
Cogn Neurodyn. 2025 Dec;19(1):87. doi: 10.1007/s11571-025-10271-9. Epub 2025 Jun 9.
One area of interest in neuroscience is the study of differences between male and female brains, encompassing structural, physiological, and neural activity, as well as their implications for behavioral traits and functional capabilities. In this study, we investigate the differences in the complexity of EEG signals between men and women and propose hidden Markov model (HMM) method for measuring complexity which significantly improves the accuracy of gender-based classification compared to conventional signal complexity measures. Using this method to measure complexity of signal, we enhanced the results by reaching to 86% decoding accuracy. Additionally, we demonstrated that the observed effect is particularly dominant in the parietal, frontal and central regions of the brain. Through signal filtering, we observed that differences in signal complexity between men and women are present across most of frequency bands with a high rate of enhancement. It is also noteworthy that the level of complexity in women's brain activity is higher than in men's. The results of HMM method showed higher classification accuracy across most frequency bands compared to conventional methods for measuring signal complexity and nonlinearity, such as entropy, Lyapunov and Hurst exponent. Importantly, the performance improvement rate was significantly higher than that of other conventional methods. Additionally, our finding of higher signal complexity in female was entirely consistent with previous studies. Overall, the results demonstrated that using a Hidden Markov Model can more effectively extract signal complexity, significantly enhancing the accuracy of EEG-based gender classification
神经科学中一个备受关注的领域是对男性和女性大脑差异的研究,涵盖结构、生理和神经活动,以及它们对行为特征和功能能力的影响。在本研究中,我们调查了男性和女性脑电图(EEG)信号复杂性的差异,并提出了隐马尔可夫模型(HMM)方法来测量复杂性,与传统的信号复杂性测量方法相比,该方法显著提高了基于性别的分类准确率。使用这种方法测量信号复杂性,我们将结果的解码准确率提高到了86%。此外,我们证明观察到的效应在大脑的顶叶、额叶和中央区域尤为显著。通过信号滤波,我们观察到男性和女性之间的信号复杂性差异在大多数频段都存在,且增强率很高。同样值得注意的是,女性大脑活动的复杂性水平高于男性。与用于测量信号复杂性和非线性的传统方法(如熵、李雅普诺夫指数和赫斯特指数)相比,HMM方法的结果在大多数频段显示出更高的分类准确率。重要的是,性能提升率显著高于其他传统方法。此外,我们发现女性信号复杂性更高这一结果与先前的研究完全一致。总体而言,结果表明使用隐马尔可夫模型可以更有效地提取信号复杂性,显著提高基于脑电图的性别分类准确率