Effective management of dementia requires the timely detection of mild cognitive impairment (MCI). This paper introduces a multi-objective optimization approach for selecting EEG channels (and features) for the purpose of detecting MCI. Firstly, each EEG signal from each channel is decomposed into subbands using either variational mode decomposition (VMD) or discrete wavelet transform (DWT). A feature is then extracted from each subband using one of the following measures: standard deviation, interquartile range, band power, Teager energy, Katz's and Higuchi's fractal dimensions, Shannon entropy, sure entropy, or threshold entropy. Different machine learning techniques are used to classify the features of MCI cases from those of healthy controls. The classifier's performance is validated using leave-one-subject-out (LOSO) cross-validation (CV). The non-dominated sorting genetic algorithm (NSGA)-II is designed with the aim of minimizing the number of EEG channels (or features) and maximizing classification accuracy. The performance is evaluated using a publicly available online dataset containing EEGs from 19 channels recorded from 24 participants. The results demonstrate a significant improvement in performance when utilizing the NSGA-II algorithm. By selecting only a few appropriate EEG channels, the LOSO CV-based results show a significant improvement compared to using all 19 channels. Additionally, the outcomes indicate that accuracy can be further improved by selecting suitable features from different channels. For instance, by combining VMD and Teager energy, the SVM accuracy obtained using all channels is 74.24%. Interestingly, when only five channels are selected using NSGA-II, the accuracy increases to 91.56%. The accuracy is further improved to 95.28% when using only 8 features selected from 7 channels. This demonstrates that by choosing informative features or channels while excluding noisy or irrelevant information, the impact of noise is reduced, resulting in improved accuracy. These promising findings indicate that, with a limited number of channels and features, accurate diagnosis of MCI is achievable, which opens the door for its application in clinical practice.
