Research Article

Boosting EEG emotion recognition: A multi-dataset study of MIL-augmented XGBoost classifiers

Volume: 17 Number: 2 July 28, 2026
TR EN

Boosting EEG emotion recognition: A multi-dataset study of MIL-augmented XGBoost classifiers

Abstract

Background: EEG-based emotion recognition has attracted growing interest in affective computing due to its high temporal resolution in capturing neural responses. However, EEG signals are inherently noisy and non-stationary, and many temporal segments within a trial may not reflect the underlying emotional state. Conventional pipelines assume all segments contribute equally to the trial label, reducing robustness when irrelevant or transitional segments are present. New Method: This study proposes a Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) framework integrated with eXtreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost) for EEG emotion recognition. Each trial is treated as a bag of temporal segment instances, with the emotional label assigned at the bag level. During training, bag labels are propagated to instances for instance-level classification with XGBoost. During inference, instance-level probabilities are aggregated via mean pooling to yield bag-level predictions, enabling the model to emphasize informative signal fragments while suppressing noise. Results: The framework is evaluated on two benchmark datasets, DEAP and VREMO, across multiple feature representations including preprocessed time-series, time-domain, frequency-domain, time-frequency, decomposition-based, and spatial features. Comparison with Existing Methods: MIL-XGBoost consistently outperforms standard XGBoost across all feature domains and classification tasks, achieving up to 94–95% accuracy for binary emotion classification on DEAP and competitive results on VREMO, without requiring synthetic augmentation or deep neural architectures. Conclusion: Integrating MIL with gradient-boosted tree models offers an efficient and robust alternative for weakly supervised EEG emotion recognition, demonstrating consistent gains under realistic labeling assumptions.

Keywords

References

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Details

Primary Language

English

Subjects

Human-Computer Interaction

Journal Section

Research Article

Publication Date

July 28, 2026

Submission Date

April 29, 2026

Acceptance Date

June 8, 2026

Published in Issue

Year 2026 Volume: 17 Number: 2

APA
Daşdemir, Y., & Sezgin, İ. C. (2026). Boosting EEG emotion recognition: A multi-dataset study of MIL-augmented XGBoost classifiers. Dicle Üniversitesi Mühendislik Fakültesi Mühendislik Dergisi, 17(2). https://doi.org/10.24012/dumf.1939758
AMA
1.Daşdemir Y, Sezgin İC. Boosting EEG emotion recognition: A multi-dataset study of MIL-augmented XGBoost classifiers. DUJE. 2026;17(2). doi:10.24012/dumf.1939758
Chicago
Daşdemir, Yaşar, and İsmet Can Sezgin. 2026. “Boosting EEG Emotion Recognition: A Multi-Dataset Study of MIL-Augmented XGBoost Classifiers”. Dicle Üniversitesi Mühendislik Fakültesi Mühendislik Dergisi 17 (2). https://doi.org/10.24012/dumf.1939758.
EndNote
Daşdemir Y, Sezgin İC (July 1, 2026) Boosting EEG emotion recognition: A multi-dataset study of MIL-augmented XGBoost classifiers. Dicle Üniversitesi Mühendislik Fakültesi Mühendislik Dergisi 17 2
IEEE
[1]Y. Daşdemir and İ. C. Sezgin, “Boosting EEG emotion recognition: A multi-dataset study of MIL-augmented XGBoost classifiers”, DUJE, vol. 17, no. 2, July 2026, doi: 10.24012/dumf.1939758.
ISNAD
Daşdemir, Yaşar - Sezgin, İsmet Can. “Boosting EEG Emotion Recognition: A Multi-Dataset Study of MIL-Augmented XGBoost Classifiers”. Dicle Üniversitesi Mühendislik Fakültesi Mühendislik Dergisi 17/2 (July 1, 2026). https://doi.org/10.24012/dumf.1939758.
JAMA
1.Daşdemir Y, Sezgin İC. Boosting EEG emotion recognition: A multi-dataset study of MIL-augmented XGBoost classifiers. DUJE. 2026;17. doi:10.24012/dumf.1939758.
MLA
Daşdemir, Yaşar, and İsmet Can Sezgin. “Boosting EEG Emotion Recognition: A Multi-Dataset Study of MIL-Augmented XGBoost Classifiers”. Dicle Üniversitesi Mühendislik Fakültesi Mühendislik Dergisi, vol. 17, no. 2, July 2026, doi:10.24012/dumf.1939758.
Vancouver
1.Yaşar Daşdemir, İsmet Can Sezgin. Boosting EEG emotion recognition: A multi-dataset study of MIL-augmented XGBoost classifiers. DUJE. 2026 Jul. 1;17(2). doi:10.24012/dumf.1939758