Lots of brain diseases are recognized by EEG recording. EEG signal has a stochastic character, this stochastic nature makes the evaluation of EEG recording complicated. Therefore we use automatic classification methods for EEG processing. This methods help the expert to find significant or physiologically important segments in the EEG recording. The k-means algorithm is a frequently used method in practice for automatic classification. The main disadvantage of the k-means algorithm is the necessary determination of the number of clusters. So far there are many methods which try to determine optimal number of clusters for k-means algorithm. The aim of this study is to test functionality of the two most frequently used methods on EEG signals, concretely the elbow and the silhouette method. In this feasibility study we compared the results of both methods on simulated data and real EEG signal. We want to prove with the help of an expert the possibility to use these functions on real EEG signal. The results show that the silhouette method applied on EEG recordings is more time-consuming than the elbow method. Neither of the methods is able to correctly recognize the number of clusters in the EEG record by expert evaluation and therefore it is not applicable to the automatic classification of EEG based on k-means algorithm.

Faculty of Biomedical Engineering Czech Technical University Prague Kladno Czech Republic

National Institute of Mental Health Klecany Czech Republic

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