Zeinabsadat Saghi, Daria Riabukhina, Olubukola Akinbami et al.
Cognitive fatigue, which transitions from focused attention to inexact responses, can cause catastrophic failures in high-stakes environments, yet current black-box assessment techniques ignore the brain's non-Markovian and time-varying interdependent properties, limiting real-time phase transition detection. We develop a fractional dynamical networks-based machine learning (FDNML) framework using coupled fractional-order differential equations to capture brain signal interdependencies and detect cognitive fatigue transitions in real-time. Multifractal properties of brain activity exhibit distinct generalized fractal dimension signatures across fatigue levels, with Wasserstein distances of 0.10, 0.13, and 0.08 between states 0-1, 1-2, and 0-2, respectively. The framework achieves 93.33% classification accuracy and 95% AUROC, enabling the prevention of performance degradation through early detection of neural state transitions.