A performance based feature selection technique for subject independent MI based BCI

Significant research has been conducted in the field of brain computer interface (BCI) algorithm development, however, many of the resulting algorithms are both complex, and specific to a particular user as the most successful methodology can vary between individuals and sessions. The objective of this study was to develop a simple yet effective method of feature selection to improve the accuracy of a subject independent BCI algorithm and streamline the process of BCI algorithm development. Over the past several years, several high precision features have been suggested by researchers to classify different motor imagery tasks. This research applies fourteen of these features as a feature pool that can be used as a reference for future researchers. Additionally, we look for the most efficient feature or feature set with four different classifiers that best differentiates several motor imagery tasks. In this work we have successfully employed a feature fusion method to obtain the best sub-set of features. We have proposed a novel computer aided feature selection method to determine the best set of features for distinguishing between motor imagery tasks in lieu of the manual feature selection that has been performed in past studies. The features selected by this method were then fed into a Linear Discriminant Analysis, K-nearest neighbor, decision tree, or support vector machine classifier for classification to determine the overall performance.

The methods used were a novel performance based additive feature fusion algorithm working in conjunction with machine learning in order to classify the motor imagery signals into particular states. The data used for this study was collected from BCI competition III dataset IVa.

The result of this algorithm was a classification accuracy of 99% for a subject independent algorithm with less computation cost compared to traditional methods, in addition to multiple feature/classifier combinations that outperform current subject independent methods.

The conclusion of this study and its significance is that it developed a viable methodology for simple, efficient feature selection and BCI algorithm development, which leads to an overall increase in algorithm classification accuracy.