Semi-supervised regression with adaptive graph learning for EEG-based emotion recognition

Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals are widely used in the field of emotion recognition since it is resistant to camouflage and contains abundant physiological information. However, EEG signals are non-stationary and have low signal-noise-ratio, making it more difficult to decode in comparison with data modalities such as facial expression and text. In this paper, we propose a model termed semi-supervised regression with adaptive graph learning (SRAGL) for cross-session EEG emotion recognition, which has two merits. On one hand, the emotional label information of unlabeled samples is jointly estimated with the other model variables by a semi-supervised regression in SRAGL. On the other hand, SRAGL adaptively learns a graph to depict the connections among EEG data samples which further facilitates the emotional label estimation process. From the experimental results on the SEED-IV data set, we have the following insights. 1) SRAGL achieves superior performance compared to some state-of-the-art algorithms. To be specific, the average accuracies are 78.18%, 80.55%, and 81.90% in the three cross-session emotion recognition tasks. 2) As the iteration number increases, SRAGL converges quickly and optimizes the emotion metric of EEG samples gradually, leading to a reliable similarity matrix finally. 3) Based on the learned regression projection matrix, we obtain the contribution of each EEG feature, which enables us to automatically identify critical frequency bands and brain regions in emotion recognition.