A comparison of common spatial patterns with complex band power features in a four-class BCI experiment

We report on the offline analysis of four-class brain-computer interface (BCI) data recordings. Although the analysis is done within defined time windows (cue-based BCI), our goal is to work toward an approach which classifies on-going electroencephalogram (EEG) signals without the use of such windows (un-cued BCI). To that end, we provide some elements of that analysis related to timing issues that will become important as we pursue this goal in the future. A new set of features called complex band power (CBP) features which make explicit use of phase are introduced and are shown to produce good results. As reference methods we used traditional band power features and the method of common spatial patterns. We consider also for the first time in the context of a four-class problem the issue of variability of the features over time and how much data is required to give good classification results. We do this in a practical way where training data precedes testing data in time.