Cross-Subject Depression Level Classification Using EEG Signals with a Sample Confidence Method

Abstract

Electroencephalogram (EEG) is a non-invasive tool for real-time neural monitoring,widely used in depression detection via deep learning. However, existing models primarily focus on binary classification (depression/normal), lacking granularity for severity assessment. To address this, we proposed the DepL-GCN, i.e., Depression Level classification based on GCN model. This model tackles two key challenges: (1) subjectivity in depres-sion-level labeling due to patient self-report biases, and (2) class imbalance across severity categories. Inspired by the model learning patterns, we introduced two novel modules: the sample confidence module and the minority sample penalty module. The former leverages the L2-norm of prediction errors to progressively filter EEG samples with weak label alignment during training, thereby reducing the impact of subjectivity; the latter automatically upweights misclassified minority-class samples to address imbalance issues. After testing on two public EEG datasets, DepL-GCN achieved accuracies of 81.13% and 81.36% for multi-class severity recognition, outperforming baseline models.Ablation studies confirmed both modules' contributions. We further discussed the strengths and limitations of regression-based models for depression-level recognition.