Background: Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a common mental illness, characterized by persistent depression, sadness, despair, etc., troubling people’s daily life and work seriously. Methods: In this work, we present a novel automatic MDD detection framework based on EEG signals. First of all, we derive highly MDD-correlated features, calculating the ratio of extracted features from EEG signals at frequency bands between $$\beta$$β and $$\alpha$$α . Then, a two-stage feature selection method named PAR is presented with the sequential combination of Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC) and recursive feature elimination (RFE), where the advantages lie in minimizing the feature searching space. Finally, we employ widely used machine learning methods of support vector machine (SVM), logistic regression (LR), and linear regression (LNR) for MDD detection with the merit of feature interpretability. Results: Experiment results show that our proposed MDD detection framework achieves competitive results. The accuracy and $$F_{1}$$F 1 score are up to 0.9895 and 0.9846, respectively. Meanwhile, the regression determination coefficient $$R^2$$R 2 for MDD severity assessment is up to 0.9479. Compared with existing MDD detection methods with the best accuracy of 0.9840 and $$F_1$$F 1 score of 0.97, our proposed framework achieves the state-of-the-art MDD detection performance. Conclusions: Development of this MDD detection framework can be potentially deployed into a medical system to aid physicians to screen out MDD patients.

In real-life multicriteria decision making (MCDM) problems, the evaluations against some criteria are often missing, inaccurate, and even uncertain, but the existing theories and models cannot handle such evaluations well. To address the issue, this paper extends the Dempster–Shafer (DS)/analytic hierarchy process (DS/AHP) approach of MCDM to handle three types of ambiguous evaluations: missing, interval-valued, and ambiguous lottery evaluations. In our extension, the aggregation of criteria's evaluation takes the following six steps: (i) calculate the expected evaluation interval and the ambiguity degree of each group of decision alternatives regarding each criterion, (ii) from them to obtain the preference degree of each group of decision alternatives, (iii) apply the DS/AHP method to obtain the mass function distribution of each group of decision alternatives, (iv) use the Dempster's rule of combination to get the overall mass function of each group of decision alternatives with respect to all criteria, (v) according to the overall mass function to count the belief function and the plausibility function of each decision alternative, and (vi) set the overall preference ordering of decision alternatives by our regret-avoid ambiguous principle and then find the optimal solution. Finally, we give an example of real estate investment to illustrate how our approach is employed to deal with real-life MCDM problems.

Sleep apnea (SA) is a common sleep-related breathing disorder that tends to induce a series of complications, such as pediatric intracranial hypertension, psoriasis, and even sudden death. Therefore, early diagnosis and treatment can effectively prevent malignant complications SA incurs. Portable monitoring (PM) is a widely used tool for people to monitor their sleep conditions outside of hospitals. In this study, we focus on SA detection based on single-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) signals which are easily collected by PM. We propose a bottleneck attention based fusion network named BAFNet, which mainly includes five parts of RRI (R-R intervals) stream network, RPA (R-peak amplitudes) stream network, global query generation, feature fusion, and classifier. To learn the feature representation of RRI/RPA segments, fully convolutional networks (FCN) with cross-learning are proposed. Meanwhile, to control the information flow between RRI and RPA networks, a global query generation with bottleneck attention is proposed. To further improve the SA detection performance, a hard sample scheme with k-means clustering is employed. Experiment results show that BAFNet can achieve competitive results, which are superior to the state-of-the-art SA detection methods. It means that BAFNet has great potential to be applied in the home sleep apnea test (HSAT) for sleep condition monitoring. The source code is released at https://github.com/Bettycxh/Bottleneck-Attention-Based-Fusion-Network-for-Sleep-Apnea-Detection.