Entropy and the Brain: An Overview

Detecting Unfavorable Driving States in Electroencephalography Based on a PCA Sample Entropy Feature and Multiple Classification Algorithms

Unfavorable driving states can cause a large number of vehicle crashes and are significant factors in leading to traffic accidents. Hence, the aim of this research is to design a robust system to detect unfavorable driving states based on sample entropy feature analysis and multiple classification algorithms. Multi-channel Electroencephalography (EEG) signals are recorded from 16 participants while performing two types of driving tasks. For the purpose of selecting optimal feature sets for classification, principal component analysis (PCA) is adopted for reducing dimensionality of feature sets. Multiple classification algorithms, namely, K nearest neighbor (KNN), decision tree (DT), support vector machine (SVM) and logistic regression (LR) are employed to improve the accuracy of unfavorable driving state detection. We use 10-fold cross-validation to assess the performance of the proposed systems. It is found that the proposed detection system, based on PCA features and the cubic SVM classification algorithm, shows robustness as it obtains the highest accuracy of 97.81%, sensitivity of 96.93%, specificity of 98.73% and precision of 98.75%. Experimental results show that the system we designed can effectively monitor unfavorable driving states.

Information Processing in the Brain as Optimal Entropy Transport: A Theoretical Approach

We consider brain activity from an information theoretic perspective. We analyze the information processing in the brain, considering the optimality of Shannon entropy transport using the Monge–Kantorovich framework. It is proposed that some of these processes satisfy an optimal transport of informational entropy condition. This optimality condition allows us to derive an equation of the Monge–Ampère type for the information flow that accounts for the branching structure of neurons via the linearization of this equation. Based on this fact, we discuss a version of Murray’s law in this context.