Emotions are essential for the intellectual ability of human beings defined by perception, concentration, and actions. Electroencephalogram (EEG) responses have been studied in different lobes of the brain for emotion recognition. An attempt has been made in this work to identify emotional states using time-domain features, and probabilistic random forest based decision fusion. The EEG signals are collected for this from an online public database. The prefrontal and frontal electrodes, namely Fp1, Fp2, F3, F4, and Fz are considered. Eleven features are extracted from each electrode, and subjected to a probabilistic random forest. The probabilities are employed to Dempster-Shafer's (D-S) based evidence theory for electrode selection using decision fusion. Results demonstrate that the method suggested is capable of classifying emotional states. The decision fusion based electrode selection appears to be most accurate (arousal F-measure = 77.9%) in classifying the emotional states. The combination of Fp2, F3, and F4 electrodes yields higher accuracy for characterizing arousal (65.1%) and valence (57.9%) dimension. Thus, the proposed method can be used to select the critical electrodes for the classification of emotions. © 2021 European Federation for Medical Informatics (EFMI) and IOS Press. © 2021 European Federation for Medical Informatics (EFMI) and IOS Press. All rights reserved.