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Epileptic Seizure Prediction Using Patient-Adaptive Transformer Networks

Machine Learning 2026-03-31 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Epileptic seizure prediction from electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings remains challenging due to strong inter-patient variability and the complex temporal structure of neural signals. This paper presents a patient-adaptive transformer framework for short-horizon seizure forecasting. The proposed approach employs a two-stage training strategy: self-supervised pretraining is first used to learn general EEG temporal representations through autoregressive sequence modeling, followed by patient-specific fine-tuning for binary prediction of seizure onset within a 30-second horizon. To enable transformer-based sequence learning, multichannel EEG signals are processed using noise-aware preprocessing and discretized into tokenized temporal sequences. Experiments conducted on subjects from the TUH EEG dataset demonstrate that the proposed method achieves validation accuracies above 90% and F1 scores exceeding 0.80 across evaluated patients, supporting the effectiveness of combining self-supervised representation learning with patient-specific adaptation for individualized seizure prediction.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.26821,
  title  = {Epileptic Seizure Prediction Using Patient-Adaptive Transformer Networks},
  author = {Mohamed Mahdi and Asma Baghdadi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.26821},
  year   = {2026}
}