Sample-Based Data Augmentation Based on Electroencephalogram Intrinsic Characteristics

Deep learning for electroencephalogram-based classification is confronted with data scarcity, due to the time-consuming and expensive data collection procedure. Data augmentation has been shown as an effective way to improve data efficiency. In addition, contrastive learning has recently been shown to hold great promise in learning effective representations without human supervision, which has the potential to improve the electroencephalogram-based recognition performance with limited labeled data. However, heavy data augmentation is a key ingredient of contrastive learning. In view of the limited number of sample-based data augmentation in electroencephalogram processing, three methods, performance-measure-based time warp, frequency noise addition and frequency masking, are proposed based on the characteristics of electroencephalogram signal. These methods are parameter learning free, easy to implement, and can be applied to individual samples. In the experiment, the proposed data augmentation methods are evaluated on three electroencephalogram-based classification tasks, including situation awareness recognition, motor imagery classification and brain-computer interface steady-state visually evoked potentials speller system. Results demonstrated that the convolutional models trained with the proposed data augmentation methods yielded significantly improved performance over baselines. In overall, this work provides more potential methods to cope with the problem of limited data and boost the classification performance in electroencephalogram processing.