Brain-computer interfacing in discriminative and stationary subspaces

Abstract

The non-stationary nature of neurophysiological measurements, e.g. EEG, makes classification of motion intentions a demanding task. Variations in the underlying brain processes often lead to significant and unexpected changes in the feature distribution resulting in decreased classification accuracy in Brain Computer Interfacing (BCI). Several methods were developed to tackle this problem by either adapting to these changes or extracting features that are invariant. Recently, a method called Stationary Subspace Analysis (SSA) was proposed and applied to BCI data. It diminishes the influence of non-stationary changes as learning and classification is performed in a stationary subspace of the data which can be extracted by SSA. In this paper we extend this method in two ways. First we propose a variant of SSA that allows to extract stationary subspaces from labeled data without disregarding class-related variations or treating class-differences as non-stationarities. Second we propose a discriminant variant of SSA that trades-off stationarity and discriminativity, thus it allows to extract stationary subspaces without losing relevant information. We show that learning in a discriminative and stationary subspace is advantageous for BCI application and outperforms the standard SSA method.