A Novel Transfer Support Matrix Machine for Motor Imagery-Based Brain Computer Interface

In recent years, emerging matrix learning methods have shown promising performance in motor imagery (MI)-based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). Nonetheless, the electroencephalography (EEG) pattern variations among different subjects necessitates collecting a large amount of labeled individual data for model training, which prolongs the calibration session. From the perspective of transfer learning, the model knowledge inherent in reference subjects incorporating few target EEG data have the potential to solve the above issue. Thus, a novel knowledge-leverage-based support matrix machine (KL-SMM) was developed to improve the classification performance when only a few labeled EEG data in the target domain (target subject) were available. The proposed KL-SMM possesses the powerful capability of a matrix learning machine, which allows it to directly learn the structural information from matrix-form EEG data. In addition, the KL-SMM can not only fully leverage few labeled EEG data from the target domain during the learning procedure but can also leverage the existing model knowledge from the source domain (source subject). Therefore, the KL-SMM can enhance the generalization performance of the target classifier while guaranteeing privacy protection to a certain extent. Finally, the objective function of the KL-SMM can be easily optimized using the alternating direction method of multipliers method. Extensive experiments were conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the KL-SMM on publicly available MI-based EEG datasets. Experimental results demonstrated that the KL-SMM outperformed the comparable methods when the EEG data were insufficient.