Clustered pattern projection for EEG dementia classification: evaluating the reliability of disorder patterns.

INTRODUCTION: Electroencephalography (EEG)-based classification of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD) relative to cognitively normal (CN) controls is commonly interpreted through stable disease-related patterns. However, classification-relevant EEG responses in computational models may also appear fragmented or weakly preserved, making subject-level reliability difficult to assess. This study investigated whether recurrent disorder-like EEG patterns can provide exploratory evidence of subject-wise discriminative organization in dementia classification.

METHODS: We analyzed a publicly available resting-state EEG dataset including AD, FTD, and CN subjects. Clustered Pattern Projection (CPP) was applied to Dynamic Mode Decomposition (DMD)-based epoch descriptors to construct prototype-based EEG representations. Classification was performed using a linear support vector machine under a nested leave-one-subject-out cross-validation (LOSO-CV) framework. Subject-level reliability was further examined using margin-based analysis.

RESULTS: CPP showed competitive subject-level performance, particularly in the FTD vs. CN classification task, a setting in which resting-state discriminative patterns are often less consistently preserved than in AD. In addition, task-dependent subject-level margin patterns were observed under strict subject-wise validation, suggesting that margin analysis may provide a useful exploratory tool for evaluating the reliability of learned EEG representations.

DISCUSSION: These findings suggest that EEG generalization in dementia classification should not be interpreted only through preserved canonical biomarkers. Instead, recurrent disorder-like patterns may contribute to computationally detectable decision structure, and CPP provides a framework for examining such patterns under strict subject-wise validation.