The detection of alcoholism is of great importance due to its effects on individuals and society. Automatic alcoholism detection system (AADS) based on electroencephalogram (EEG) signals is effective, but the design of a robust AADS is a challenging problem. AADS’ current designs are based on conventional, hand-engineered methods and restricted performance. Driven by the excellent deep learning (DL) success in many recognition tasks, we implement an AAD system based on EEG signals using DL. A DL model requires huge number of learnable parameters and also needs a large dataset of EEG signals for training which is not easy to obtain for the AAD problem. In order to solve this problem, we propose a multi-channel Pyramidal neural convolutional (MP-CNN) network that requires a less number of learnable parameters. Using the deep CNN model, we build an AAD system to detect from EEG signal segments whether the subject is alcoholic or normal. We validate the robustness and effectiveness of proposed AADS using KDD, a benchmark dataset for alcoholism detection problem. In order to find the brain region that contributes significant role in AAD, we investigated the effects of selected 19 EEG channels (SC-19), those from the whole brain (ALL-61), and 05 brain regions, i.e., TEMP, OCCIP, CENT, FRONT, and PERI. The results show that SC-19 contributes significant role in AAD with the accuracy of 100%. The comparison reveals that the state-of-the-art systems are outperformed by the AADS. The proposed AADS will be useful in medical diagnosis research and health care systems.

Electroencephalogram; convolutional neural network; deep learning; alcoholism