Comparing Different Classifiers in Sensory Motor Brain Computer Interfaces

A problem that impedes the progress in Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) research is the difficulty in reproducing the results of different papers. Comparing different algorithms at present is very difficult. Some improvements have been made by the use of standard datasets to evaluate different algorithms. However, the lack of a comparison framework still exists. In this paper, we construct a new general comparison framework to compare different algorithms on several standard datasets. All these datasets correspond to sensory motor BCIs, and are obtained from 21 subjects during their operation of synchronous BCIs and 8 subjects using self-paced BCIs. Other researchers can use our framework to compare their own algorithms on their own datasets. We have compared the performance of different popular classification algorithms over these 29 subjects and performed statistical tests to validate our results. Our findings suggest that, for a given subject, the choice of the classifier for a BCI system depends on the feature extraction method used in that BCI system. This is in contrary to most of publications in the field that have used Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) as the classifier of choice for BCI systems.