Variational Mixture of Graph Neural Experts for Alzheimer's Disease Recognition across Frequency Bands in EEG Brain Networks

Dementia disorders such as Alzheimer's disease (AD) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD) exhibit overlapping electrophysiological signatures in EEG that challenge accurate diagnosis. Existing EEG-based methods are limited by full-band frequency analysis, which hinders the precise differentiation of dementia subtypes and severity stages. To address this limitation, we propose a Variational Mixture of Graph Neural Experts (VMoGE) framework that integrates multi-band EEG analysis with variational graph neural networks and a mixture-of-experts architecture. Each expert specializes in a specific EEG frequency band and models brain connectivity using a Gaussian Markov random field prior, while a variational gating mechanism adaptively integrates the expert outputs. This design enables the model to learn frequency-specific brain network representations while modeling latent uncertainty through variational inference. Experimental results on two EEG dementia datasets show that VMoGE achieves strong performance, with an AUC of 0.89 for HC vs. AD classification in the main comparison and competitive results across dementia subtyping and CDR staging tasks. Clinically, VMoGE offers three key translational values: the expert gating weights correlate with MMSE scores and CDR severity; slow-wave $δ$- and $θ$-band contributions are associated with AD-related EEG slowing and disease progression; and spatially localized activation maps reveal posterior $θ$- and $α$-band alterations and region-specific $β$-band changes, providing neurophysiologically interpretable markers aligned with known AD neuropathology.