Major Depressive Disorder Diagnosis Using Time–Frequency Embeddings Based on Deep Metric Learning and Neuro-Fuzzy from EEG Signals

Abstract

Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a prevalent mental health condition that requires accurate and objective diagnostic tools. Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals provide valuable insights into brain activity and have been widely studied for mental disorder classification. In this study, we propose a novel DML + ANFIS framework that integrates deep metric learning (DML) with an adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) for the automated diagnosis of major depressive disorder (MDD) using EEG time series signals. Time–frequency features are first extracted from raw EEG signals using the short-time Fourier transform (STFT) and the continuous wavelet transform (CWT). These features are then embedded into a low-dimensional space using a DML approach, which enhances the inter-class separability between MDD and healthy control (HC) groups in the feature space. The resulting time–frequency feature embeddings are finally classified using an ANFIS, which integrates fuzzy logic-based nonlinear inference with deep metric learning. The proposed DML + ANFIS framework was evaluated on a publicly available EEG dataset comprising MDD patients and healthy control (HC) subjects. Under subject-dependent evaluation, the STFT-based DML + ANFIS and CWT-based models achieved an accuracy of 92.07% and 98.41% and an AUC of 97.28% and 99.50%, respectively. Additional experiments using subject-independent cross-validation demonstrated reduced but consistent performance trends, thus indicating the framework’s ability to generalize to unseen subjects. Comparative experiments showed that the proposed approach generally outperformed conventional deep learning models, including Bi-LSTM, 2D CNN, and DML + NN, under identical experimental conditions. Notably, the DML module compressed 1280-dimensional EEG features into a 10-dimensional embedding, thus achieving substantial dimensionality reduction while preserving discriminative information. These results suggest that the proposed DML + ANFIS framework provides an effective balance between classification performance, generalization capability, and computational efficiency for EEG-based MDD diagnosis.