The aim of this study is to design a robust feature extraction method for the classification of multiclass EEG signals to determine valuable features from original epileptic EEG data and to discover an efficient classifier for the features. An optimum allocation based principal component analysis method named as OA_PCA is developed for the feature extraction from epileptic EEG data. As EEG data from different channels are correlated and huge in number, the optimum allocation (OA) scheme is used to discover the most favorable representatives with minimal variability from a large number of EEG data. The principal component analysis (PCA) is applied to construct uncorrelated components and also to reduce the dimensionality of the OA samples for an enhanced recognition. In order to choose a suitable classifier for the OA_PCA feature set, four popular classifiers: least square support vector machine (LS-SVM), naive bayes classifier (NB), k-nearest neighbor algorithm (KNN), and linear discriminant analysis (LDA) are applied and tested. Furthermore, our approaches are also compared with some recent research work. The experimental results show that the LS-SVM_1v1 approach yields 100% of the overall classification accuracy (OCA), improving up to 7.10% over the existing algorithms for the epileptic EEG data. The major finding of this research is that the LS-SVM with the 1v1 system is the best technique for the OA_PCA features in the epileptic EEG signal classification that outperforms all the recent reported existing methods in the literature. 
Designing a robust feature extraction method based on optimum allocation and principal component analysis for epileptic EEG signal classification