Deception Detection from Five-Channel Wearable EEG on LieWaves: A Reproducible Baseline for Subject-Dependent and Subject-Independent Evaluation

Deception detection with low-channel wearable EEG requires protocols that generalize across people while remaining practical for portable devices. Using the public LieWaves dataset (27 subjects recorded with a five-channel Emotiv Insight headset), we evaluate to what extent five-channel head-mounted EEG can support lie–truth discrimination under both subject-independent and subject-dependent evaluations. For the subject-independent setting, we train a compact Residual Network with Squeeze-and-Excitation blocks (ResNet-SE) model on raw overlapping windows with focal loss, light data augmentation, and grouped cross-validation by subject; out-of-fold window probabilities are averaged per session and converted to labels using a single decision threshold estimated from the cross-validated session scores. For the subject-dependent setting, we adopt an overlapping short-window Residual Temporal Convolutional Network with Squeeze-and-Excitation and Attention (Res-TCN-SE-Attention) model that fuses raw EEG with discrete wavelet transform (DWT)-based spectral and handcrafted band-power and Hjorth features, using an 80/10/10 split at the recording/session level (stratified by session label), so that all windows from a given session are assigned to a single subset; because each subject contributes two sessions, the same subject may still appear across subsets via different sessions. The subject-independent model attains 66.70% session-level accuracy with an AUC of 0.58 on unseen subjects, underscoring the difficulty of person-independent generalization from low-channel wearable EEG. Because practical deployment requires generalization to previously unseen individuals, we treat the subject-independent evaluation as the primary estimate of real-world generalization. In contrast, the subject-dependent pipeline reaches 99.94% window-level accuracy under the overlapping sliding-window (OSW) setting with a session-disjoint split (no session contributes windows to more than one subset). This near-ceiling performance reflects the optimistic nature of subject-dependent evaluation with highly overlapping windows, even when avoiding within-session train–test overlap, and should not be interpreted as a meaningful indicator of deception-detection capability under realistic deployment constraints. These results suggest limited, above-chance separability between lie and truth sessions in LieWaves using a five-channel wearable EEG under the studied protocol; however, performance remains far from deployment-ready and is strongly shaped by evaluation design. Explicit reporting of both protocols, together with clear rules for windowing, aggregation, and threshold selection, supports more reproducible and comparable benchmarking.