Conditional Spatial Classification of Expert-Confirmed Interictal Epileptiform Discharge Epochs: An EEG-ECG Ablation and SHAP Analysis

<jats:p>Abstract Interictal epileptiform discharges (IEDs) are diagnostically important EEG abnormalities observed between seizures. This study addresses a conditional spatial-classification task where every analyzed four-second epoch had already been reviewed and confirmed by experts as containing an IED, and the model assigned that epoch to one of five predefined scalp-distribution categories (generalized, frontal, temporal, occipital, or centro-parietal). The analysis therefore does not evaluate IED-versus-non-IED detection. After preprocessing, 2,514 IED-labelled epochs were analyzed using identical stratified epoch-level partitions, SMOTE based training, 26 handcrafted features per included channel, and multiple machine-learning classifiers. A staged channel ablation compared 19-channel scalp EEG, 21-channel EEG with ECG, and the complete 29-channel input containing scalp EEG, referential, ECG, and EMG channels. The best EEG-only result was obtained with linear discriminant analysis (88.89% test accuracy). CatBoost achieved 93.25% on EEG with ECG channel and 94.44% with the whole channel set. All eight directly comparable classifiers showed numerically higher test accuracy after ECG channel was added; for CatBoost, the increase was 6.35 percentage points. In the EEG with ECG channel, CatBoost model on ECG channel on right and left arm received respectively 15.79% and 15.12% of normalized global SHAP attribution, and beta-band power was the leading of all features (18.76%). These SHAP values indicate model-specific predictive contributions and do not establish physiological biomarkers, causal autonomic mechanisms, or clinical localization. The findings support a limited methodological conclusion which is ECG-derived features were associated with improved internal epoch-level categorization of expert-confirmed IED epochs. They do not establish IED detection, artifact rejection, independent EMG effects, or generalization to unseen patients.</jats:p>