Channel Selected Stratified Nested Cross Validation for Clinically Relevant EEG Based Parkinsons Disease Detection

Abstract: The early detection of Parkinsons disease remains a critical challenge in clinical neuroscience, with electroencephalography offering a noninvasive and scalable pathway toward population level screening. While machine learning has shown promise in this domain, many reported results suffer from methodological flaws, most notably patient level data leakage, inflating performance estimates and limiting clinical translation. To address these modeling pitfalls, we propose a unified evaluation framework grounded in nested cross validation and incorporating three complementary safeguards: (i) patient level stratification to eliminate subject overlap and ensure unbiased generalization, (ii) multi layered windowing to harmonize heterogeneous EEG recordings while preserving temporal dynamics, and (iii) inner loop channel selection to enable principled feature reduction without information leakage. Applied across three independent datasets with a heterogeneous number of channels, a convolutional neural network trained under this framework achieved 80.6% accuracy and demonstrated state of the art performance under held out population block testing, comparable to other methods in the literature. This performance underscores the necessity of nested cross validation as a safeguard against bias and as a principled means of selecting the most relevant information for patient level decisions, providing a reproducible foundation that can extend to other biomedical signal analysis domains.