A Multivariate Weighted Ordinal Pattern Transition Network for Characterizing Driver Fatigue Behavior from EEG Signals

Abstract

Driver fatigue has caused numerous vehicle crashes and traffic injuries. Exploring the fatigue mechanism and detecting fatigue state are of great significance for preventing traffic accidents, and further lessening economic and societal loss. Due to the objectivity of EEG signals and the availability of EEG acquisition equipment, EEG-based fatigue detection task has raised great attention in recent years. Although there exist various methods for this task, the study of fatigue mechanism and detection of fatigue state still remain much to be explored. To investigate these problems, a multivariate weighted ordinal pattern transition (MWOPT) network is proposed in this paper. To be specific, a simulated driving experiment was first conducted to obtain the EEG signals of subjects in alert state and fatigue state respectively. Then the MWOPT network is constructed based on a novel Shannon entropy. To probe into the mechanism underlying fatigue behavior, the small-worldness index is extracted from the generated MWOPT network. Furthermore, the nodal degree index is input into a classifier to distinguish the fatigue state from alert state. The obtained high accuracy indicates the effectiveness of the proposed network for EEG-based fatigue detection. Besides, four nodes are found to play an important role in identifying fatigue state. These results suggest that the proposed method enables to analyze nonlinear multivariate time series and investigate the driving fatigue behavior.