Hardware-friendly seizure detection with a boosted ensemble of shallow decision trees

Efficient on-chip learning is becoming an essential element of implantable biomedical devices. Despite a substantial literature on automated seizure detection algorithms, hardware-friendly implementation of such techniques is not sufficiently addressed. In this paper, we propose to employ a gradientboosted ensemble of decision trees to achieve a reasonable trade-off between detection accuracy and implementation cost. Combined with the proposed feature extraction model, we show that these classifiers quickly become competitive with more complex learning models previously proposed for hardware implementation, with only a small number of low-depth (d < 4) “shallow” trees. The results are verified on more than 3460 hours of intracranial EEG data including 430 seizures from 27 patients with epilepsy