Motor Imagery EEG Decoding Based on New Spatial-Frequency Feature and Hybrid Feature Selection Method

Abstract

Feature extraction and selection are important parts of motor imagery electroencephalogram (EEG) decoding and have always been the focus and difficulty of brain-computer interface (BCI) system research. In order to improve the accuracy of EEG decoding and reduce model training time, new feature extraction and selection methods are proposed in this paper. First, a new spatial-frequency feature extraction method is proposed. The original EEG signal is preprocessed, and then the common spatial pattern (CSP) is used for spatial filtering and dimensionality reduction. Finally, the filter bank method is used to decompose the spatially filtered signals into multiple frequency subbands, and the logarithmic band power feature of each frequency subband is extracted. Second, to select the subject-specific spatial-frequency features, a hybrid feature selection method based on the Fisher score and support vector machine (SVM) is proposed. The Fisher score of each feature is calculated, then a series of threshold parameters are set to generate different feature subsets, and finally, SVM and cross-validation are used to select the optimal feature subset. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated using two sets of publicly available BCI competition data and a set of self-collected data. The total average accuracy of the three data sets achieved by the proposed method is 82.39%, which is 2.99% higher than the CSP method. The experimental results show that the proposed method has a better classification effect than the existing methods, and at the same time, feature extraction and feature selection time also have greater advantages.