Comparison of feature selection and classification methods for a brain-computer interface driven by non-motor imagery

The aim of this study was to compare methods for feature extraction and classification of EEG signals for a brain-computer interface (BCI) driven by auditory and spatial navigation imagery. Features were extracted using autoregressive modeling and optimized discrete wavelet transform. The features were selected with exhaustive search, from the combination of features of two and three channels, and with a discriminative measure (r (2)). Moreover, Bayesian classifier and support vector machine (SVM) with Gaussian kernel were compared. The results showed that the two classifiers provided similar classification accuracy. Conversely, the exhaustive search of the optimal combination of features from two and three channels significantly improved performance with respect to using r(2) for channel selection. With features optimally extracted from three channels with optimized scaling filter in the discrete wavelet transform, the classification accuracy was on average 72.2%. Thus, the choice of features had greater impact on performance than the choice of the classifier for discrimination between the two non-motor imagery tasks investigated. The results are relevant for the choice of the translation algorithm for an on-line BCI system based on non-motor imagery.