Within-frequency coupling (WFC) and cross-frequency coupling (CFC) in brain
networks reflect neural synchronization within the same frequency band and
cross-band oscillatory interactions, respectively. Their synergy provides a
comprehensive understanding of neural mechanisms underlying cognitive states
such as emotion. However, existing multi-channel EEG studies often analyze WFC
or CFC separately, failing to fully leverage their complementary properties.
This study proposes a dual-branch graph neural network (DB-GNN) to jointly
identify within- and cross-frequency coupled brain networks. Firstly, DBGNN
leverages its unique dual-branch learning architecture to efficiently mine
global collaborative information and local cross-frequency and within-frequency
coupling information. Secondly, to more fully perceive the global information
of cross-frequency and within-frequency coupling, the global perception branch
of DB-GNN adopts a Transformer architecture. To prevent overfitting of the
Transformer architecture, this study integrates prior within- and
cross-frequency coupling information into the Transformer inference process,
thereby enhancing the generalization capability of DB-GNN. Finally, a
multi-scale graph contrastive learning regularization term is introduced to
constrain the global and local perception branches of DB-GNN at both
graph-level and node-level, enhancing its joint perception ability and further
improving its generalization performance. Experimental validation on the
emotion recognition dataset shows that DB-GNN achieves a testing accuracy of
97.88% and an F1- score of 97.87%, reaching the state-of-the-art performance.