Feature selection for the classification of movements from single movement-related potentials

Classification of movement-related potentials recorded from the scalp to their corresponding limb is a crucial task in brain-computer interfaces based on such potentials. Many features can be extracted from raw electroencephalographic signals to be used for classification, but the utilization of irrelevant or superfluous features is detrimental to the performance of classification algorithms. It is, therefore, necessary to select a small number of relevant features for the classification task. This paper demonstrates the use of two feature selection methods to choose a small number (10-20) of relevant features from a bank containing upward of 1000 features. One method is based on information theory and the other on the use of genetic algorithms. We show that the former is poorly suited for the aforementioned classification task and discuss the probable reasons for this. However, using a genetic algorithm on data recorded from five subjects we demonstrate that it is possible to differentiate between the movements of two limbs with a classification accuracy of 87% using as little as 10 features without subject training. With the addition of a simple coding scheme, this method can be applied to multiple limb classification and a 63% classification accuracy rate can be reached when attempting to distinguish between three limbs.