Empirical comparison of deep learning methods for EEG decoding

Electroencephalography (EEG) is a technique that can be used in non-invasive brain-machine interface (BMI) systems to register brain electrical activity. The EEG signals are non-linear and non-stationary, making the decoding procedure a complex task. Deep learning techniques have been successfully applied in several research fields, often improving the results compared with traditional approaches. Therefore, it is believed that these techniques can also improve the process of decoding brain signals in BMI systems. In this work, we present the implementation of two deep learning-based decoders and we compared the results with other state of art deep learning methods. The first decoder uses long short-term memory (LSTM) recurrent neural network and the second, entitled EEGNet-LSTM, combines a well-known neural decoder based on convolutional neural networks, called EEGNet, with some LSTM layers. The decoders have been tested using data set 2a from BCI Competition IV, and the results showed that the EEGNet-LSTM decoder has been approximately 23% better than the competition-winning decoder. A Wilcoxon t-test showed a significant difference between the two decoders (Z = 2.524, p = 0.012). The LSTM-based decoder has been approximately 9% higher than the best decoder from the same competition. However, there was no significant difference (Z = 1.540, p = 0.123). In order to verify the replication of the EEGNet-LSTM decoder on another data, we performed a test with PhysioNet's Physiobank EEG Motor Movement/Imagery dataset. The EEGNet-LSTM presented a higher performance (0.85 accuracy) than the EEGNet (0.82 accuracy). The results of this work can be important for the development of new research, as well as EEG-based BMI systems, which can benefit from the high precision of neural decoders.