MEWT-Enhanced EEGNet for ASD EEG Classification: Performance Evaluation with k-Fold Cross-Validation

Accurate and reliable classification of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) from electroencephalography (EEG) signals remains challenging due to the inherently nonstationary, nonlinear, and multichannel nature of EEG data. These properties complicate the extraction of discriminative features that are both stable and computationally efficient. To address this challenge, this study proposes a compact deep-learning pipeline that integrates the Multivariate Empirical Wavelet Transform (MEWT) with EEGNet for ASD–EEG classification. MEWT decomposes multichannel EEG signals into spectrally aligned subbands while preserving inter-channel relationships. The resulting MEWT-based features are then processed by EEGNet, a lightweight convolutional neural network specifically designed for EEG-based learning tasks. Performance was evaluated using 5-fold cross-validation. The proposed MEWT with the the EEGNet model achieved a mean test accuracy of 98.35%, with consistently high precision (98.23%), recall (98.45%), F1-score (98.34%), and specificity (98.24%) across all folds. Confusion-matrix results indicated very few and well-balanced false positives and false negatives, supporting stable discrimination between ASD and control EEG segments. A one-sample one-tailed t-test against a 50% chance level confirmed that all evaluated metrics were significantly above chance (p < 0.0001). When benchmarked against previously reported results on the same dataset, the proposed approach slightly improved upon EMD with EEGNet (97.99%) and clearly outperformed EWT with EEGNet (95.08%), suggesting that MEWT-derived multichannel features are well matched to compact convolutional architectures for ASD–EEG analysis. Despite these strong results, the study is limited by a small, single-site cohort and the use of a single deep-learning model. Future work will focus on standardized retraining across multiple feature families and validation on larger and more diverse populations to further assess robustness and generalizability