The most cost-effective data collection method is electroencephalography (EEG) to obtain meaningful information about the brain. Therefore, EEG signal processing is very important for neuroscience and machine learning (ML). The primary objective of this research is to detect neonatal seizures and explain these seizures using the new version of Directed Lobish. This research uses a publicly available neonatal EEG signal dataset to get comparative results. In order to classify these EEG signals, an explainable feature engineering (EFE) model has been proposed. In this EFE model, there are four essential phases and these phases: (i) automaton and transformer-based feature extraction, (ii) feature selection deploying cumulative weight-based neighborhood component analysis (CWNCA), (iii) the Directed Lobish (DLob) and Causal Connectome Theory (CCT)-based explainable result generation and (iv) classification deploying t algorithm-based support vector machine (tSVM). In the first phase, we have used a channel transformer to get channel numbers and these values have been divided into three levels and these levels are named (1) high, (2) medium and (3) low. By utilizing these levels, we have created an automaton and this automaton has three nodes (each node defines each level). In the feature extraction phase, transition tables of these nodes has been extracted. Therefore, the proposed feature extraction function is termed Triple Nodes Automaton-based Transition table Pattern (TATPat). The used EEG signal dataset contains 19 channels and there are 9 (= 3
2
) connection in the defined automaton. Thus, the presented TATPat extracts 3249 (= 19 × 19 × 9) features from each EEG segment. To choose the most informative features of these 3249 features, a new feature selector which is CWNCA has been applied. By cooperating findings of this feature selector and the presented DLob, the explainable results have been obtained. The last phase is the classification phase and to get high classification performance from this phase, an ensemble classifier (tSVM) has been presented and the classification results have been obtained using two validation techniques which are 10-fold cross-validation (CV) and leave-one subject-out (LOSO) CV. The proposed EFE model generates a DLob string and by using this string, the explainable results have been obtained. Moreover, the presented EFE model attained 99.15% and 76.37% classification accuracy deploying 10-fold and LOSO CVs respectively. According to the classification performances, the recommended TATPat-based EFE is a good model at EEG signal classification. Also, the presented TATPat-based EFE model is a good model for explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) since TTPat-based EFE is cooperating by the DLob.
