DAH-Net: A Dual-Attention Hybrid Network for Interpretable and Robust EEG-Based Emotion Recognition

EEG-based emotion recognition supports affective brain-computer interfaces and mental health monitoring yet remains challenged by signal complexity, subject variability, and limited interpretability. We propose DAH-Net, a dual-attention hybrid network integrating 1D-CNN, BiLSTM, and dual multi-head attention (16+8 heads) for three-class EEG emotion classification. Evaluated on 2,479 samples with 988 EEG features, DAH-Net achieves 99.19% held-out test accuracy with a 0.81% train-test gap, outperforming RF (96.17%), SVM (96.77%), MLP (97.18%), and Transformer (98.19%) baselines. Friedman testing (chi2 = 28.54, p < 0.001) and post-hoc Wilcoxon comparisons confirm statistical significance. Feature-level analysis using Random Forest importance, SHAP attribution, and feature category isolation shows that covariance features achieve near-baseline standalone accuracy (94.96%), while eigenvalue features show limited standalone performance (84.07%) but provide compact complementary information. The compact architecture (3.33M parameters, approximately 13.3MB using 32-bit weights) suggests potential for future lightweight EEG-based affective computing, pending subject-independent and external validation.