Multiobjective Evolutionary Sequential Channel/ Feature Selection for EEG Motor Imagery Analysis

Motor imagery (MI) analysis from EEG signals constitutes a class of emerging brain-computer interface (BCI) applications that face EEG's predominant complexities arising from the multitude of channels and the vast number of possible features. This study presents a two-step multiobjective set-based integer-coded fuzzy-initialized evolutionary algorithm (MOSIFE) for efficient EEG-based MI signal analysis. The two-step process is a non-dominant wrapper strategy that sequentially identifies the optimal channels and the minimal set of features, thereby reducing MI's combinatorial search complexity. We also employ a reptile-based search algorithm (RSA), a recent metaheuristic for efficient search in multimodal continuous domains, to optimize the classifier's hyper-parameters. The proposed MOSIFE-RSA algorithm is benchmarked against 12 representative algorithms on four standard BCI Competition databases, including IV-I, III-IVa, III-IIIa, and II. The results show that MOSIFE-RSA improves accuracy by 20%, with channel selection contributing as much as 15% and feature selection as much as 5% towards these results. Furthermore, it reduces computational complexity by 81% through channel selection and 16% through feature selection, demonstrating its effectiveness in advancing EEG-based MI signal analysis. This research has practical implications for developing more accurate and efficient brain-computer interface systems.