FAPEX: Fractional Amplitude-Phase Expressor for Robust Cross-Subject Seizure Prediction

Precise, generalizable subject-agnostic seizure prediction (SASP) remains a fundamental challenge due to the intrinsic complexity and significant spectral variability of electrophysiologial signals across individuals and recording modalities. We propose FAPEX, a novel architecture that introduces a learnable fractional neural frame operator (FrNFO) for adaptive time–frequency decomposition. Unlike conventional models that exhibit spectral bias toward low frequencies, our FrNFO employs fractional-order convolutions to capture both high and low-frequency dynamics, achieving approximately $10\%$ improvement in F1-score and sensitivity over state-of-the-art baselines.

The FrNFO enables the extraction of instantaneous phase and amplitude representations that are particularly informative for preictal biomarker discovery and enhance out-of-distribution generalization. FAPEX further integrates structural state-space modeling and channelwise attention, allowing it to handle heterogeneous electrode montages.

Evaluated across 12 benchmarks spanning species (human, rat, dog, macaque) and modalities (Scalp‑EEG, SEEG, ECoG, LFP), FAPEX consistently outperforms 23 supervised and 10 self-supervised baselines under nested cross-validation, with gains of up to $15\%$ in sensitivity on complex cross-domain scenarios. It further demonstrates superior performance in several external validation cohorts. To our knowledge, these establish FAPEX as the first epilepsy model to show consistent superiority in SASP, offering a promising solution for discovering epileptic biomarker evidence supporting the existence of a distinct and identifiable preictal state for and clinical translation.