Motor imagery classification method based on relative wavelet packet entropy brain network and improved lasso

Motor imagery (MI) electroencephalogram (EEG) signals have a low signal-to-noise ratio, which brings challenges in feature extraction and feature selection with high classification accuracy. In this study, we proposed an approach that combined an improved lasso with relief-f to extract the wavelet packet entropy features and the topological features of the brain function network. For signal denoising and channel filtering, raw MI EEG was filtered based on an R² map, and then the wavelet soft threshold and one-to-one multi-class score common spatial pattern algorithms were used. Subsequently, the relative wavelet packet entropy and corresponding topological features of the brain network were extracted. After feature fusion, mutcorLasso and the relief-f method were applied for feature selection, followed by three classifiers and an ensemble classifier, respectively. The experiments were conducted on two public EEG datasets (BCI Competition III dataset IIIa and BCI Competition IV dataset IIa) to verify this proposed method. The results showed that the brain network topology features and feature selection methods can retain the information of EEG more effectively and reduce the computational complexity, and the average classification accuracy for both public datasets was above 90%; hence, this algorithms is suitable in MI-BCI and has potential applications in rehabilitation and other fields.