Subject-independent Classification of Meditative State from the Resting State using EEG
arXiv Preprint Archive – April 25, 2025
Source: arXiv
Summary
Brain wave patterns can reveal when someone is meditating with remarkable accuracy. Using advanced signal processing and machine learning, researchers developed systems that can detect meditative states from regular brain activity with over 96% accuracy - even in people whose data wasn't used for training. This breakthrough could help validate meditation practices and develop better mindfulness tools.
Abstract
While it is beneficial to objectively determine whether a subject is meditating, most research in the literature reports good results only in a subject-dependent manner. This study aims to distinguish the modified state of consciousness experienced during Rajyoga meditation from the resting state of the brain in a subject-independent manner using EEG data. Three architectures have been proposed and evaluated: The CSP-LDA Architecture utilizes common spatial pattern (CSP) for feature extraction and linear discriminant analysis (LDA) for classification. The CSP-LDA-LSTM Architecture employs CSP for feature extraction, LDA for dimensionality reduction, and long short-term memory (LSTM) networks for classification, modeling the binary classification problem as a sequence learning problem. The SVD-NN Architecture uses singular value decomposition (SVD) to select the most relevant components of the EEG signals and a shallow neural network (NN) for classification. The CSP-LDA-LSTM architecture gives the best performance with 98.2% accuracy for intra-subject classification. The SVD-NN architecture provides significant performance with 96.4\% accuracy for inter-subject classification. This is comparable to the best-reported accuracies in the literature for intra-subject classification. Both architectures are capable of capturing subject-invariant EEG features for effectively classifying the meditative state from the resting state. The high intra-subject and inter-subject classification accuracies indicate these systems' robustness and their ability to generalize across different subjects.