Modeling Markers for Detection of Psychiatric Disorders Using EEG Signals

Abstract

The diagnosis of mental (psychiatric) disorders is challenging, and there is a lack of consensus on objective diagnostic criteria that are based on definitive signs that accompany the disorder. There is a need, therefore, to develop objective tools for the examination of these disorders. We present here a novel machine learning (ML) approach that accurately identifies disorders. The approach uses electroencephalography (EEG) signals for diagnosis, which are processed to extract novel region based markers that are found to contain key information about the types of disorders. Subsequently, a support vector machine (SVM) classifier is modeled, integrated with sequential feature (marker) selection (SFS), which identifies optimal and compact marker subsets for disorder detection. The proposed system has been validated using a publicly available dataset. The developed model was benchmarked against existing models and was shown to perform superior to the models it was extensively compared with; it demonstrated a 98.33% accuracy in detecting obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Our findings indicate that an accurate psychiatric diagnosis system can be achieved using EEG signals with significantly fewer, and more interpretable markers. This simpler and transparent approach improves the practicality and trustworthiness of AI/ML-driven diagnostic tools, making them more suitable for real-world clinical integration and understanding by medical professionals.

Received: 5 September 2025 | Revised: 17 November 2025 | Accepted: 15 January 2026

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest to this work.

Data Availability Statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in OSF repository at https://osf.io/8bsvr/.

Author Contribution Statement

Steven Chris: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Writing — original draft, Writing — review & editing. Debasish Mishra: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software, Validation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Resources, Writing — original draft, Writing — review & editing, Supervision. Lakshman Varanasi: Methodology, Resources, Writing — review & editing, Supervision, Funding acquisition. Varun Viswanathan: Methodology, Writing — review & editing, Supervision.