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This paper proposes a novel horizontal visibility graph entropy (HVGE) approach to evaluate EEG signals from alcoholic subjects and controlled drinkers and compare with a sample entropy (SaE) method. Firstly, HVGEs and SaEs are extracted from 1,200 recordings of biomedical signals, respectively. A statistical analysis method is employed to choose the optimal channels to identify the abnormalities in alcoholics. Five group channels are selected and forwarded to a K-Nearest Neighbour (K-NN) and a support vector machine (SVM) to conduct classification, respectively. The experimental results show that the HVGEs associated with left hemisphere, \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$C$$\end{document}C1, \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$C$$\end{document}C3 and FC5 electrodes, of alcoholics are significantly abnormal. The accuracy of classification with 10-fold cross-validation is 87.5 \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\%$$\end{document}% with about three HVGE features. By using just optimal 13-dimension HVGE features, the accuracy is 95.8 \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\%$$\end{document}%. In contrast, SaE features associated cannot identify the left hemisphere disorder for alcoholism and the maximum classification ratio based on SaE is just 95.2 \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\%$$\end{document}% even using all channel signals. These results demonstrate that the HVGE method is a promising approach for alcoholism identification by EEG signals. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s40708-014-0003-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.