SHAP-AAD: DeepSHAP-Guided Channel Reduction for EEG Auditory Attention Detection

Electroencephalography (EEG)-based auditory attention detection (AAD) offers a non-invasive way to enhance hearing aids, but conventional methods rely on too many electrodes, limiting wearability and comfort. This paper presents SHAP-AAD, a two-stage framework that combines DeepSHAP-based channel selection with a lightweight temporal convolutional network (TCN) for efficient AAD using fewer channels.DeepSHAP, an explainable AI technique, is applied to a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) trained on topographic alpha-power maps to rank channel importance, and the top-k EEG channels are used to train a compact TCN. Experiments on the DTU dataset show that using 32 channels yields comparable accuracy to the full 64-channel setup (79.21% vs. 81.06%) on average. In some cases, even 8 channels can deliver satisfactory accuracy. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of SHAP-AAD in reducing complexity while preserving high detection performance.