A Multi-Class Intra-Trial Trajectory Analysis Technique to Visualize and Quantify Variability of Mental Imagery EEG...

High inter- and intra-individual variation is a prominent characteristic of electroencephalography (EEG) signals and a significant inhibitor to the practical implementation of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) outside of research laboratories. However, a few methods exist to assess EEG signal variability. Here, a novel multi-class intra-trial trajectory (MITT) analysis to study EEG variability for mental imagery BCIs is presented. The methods yield insight into different aspects of signal variation, specifically (i) inter-individual, (ii) inter-task, (iii) inter-trial, and (iv) intra-trial. A novel representation of the time evolution of EEG signals was developed. Task trials were segmented into short temporal windows and represented in a feature space derived from unsupervised clustering of trial covariance matrices. Using this representation, temporal trajectories through the feature space were constructed. Two metrics were defined to assess user performance based on these trajectories: (1) InterTaskDiff, based on time-varying distances between the mean trajectories of different tasks, and (2) InterTrialVar, which measured the inter-trial variation of the temporal trajectories along the feature dimensions. Analysis of three-class BCI data from 14 adolescents revealed both metrics correlated significantly with classification results. Further analysis of intra-trial trajectories suggested the existence of characteristic task- and user-specific temporal dynamics. The participant-specific insights provided by MITT analysis could be used to overcome EEG-variability challenges impeding practical implementation of BCIs by elucidating avenues to improve user training feedback or selection of user-optimal classifiers and hyperparameters.