A Domain Adaptation-Based Method for Classification of Motor Imagery EEG

Abstract

Non-stationarity of EEG signals lead to high variability across sessions, which results in low classification accuracy. To reduce the inter-session variability, an unsupervised domain adaptation method is proposed. Arithmetic mean and covariance are exploited to represent the data distribution. First, overall mean alignment is conducted between the source and target data. Then, the data in the target domain is labeled by a classifier trained with the source data. The per-class mean and covariance of the target data are estimated based on the predicted labels. Next, an alignment from the source domain to the target domain is performed according to the covariance of each class in the target domain. Finally, per-class mean adaptation is required after covariance alignment to remove the shift of data distribution caused by covariance alignment. Two public BCI competition datasets, namely the BCI competition III dataset IVa and the BCI competition IV dataset IIa were used to evaluate the proposed method. On both datasets, the proposed method effectively improved classification accuracy.