ODL-BCI: Optimal deep learning model for brain-computer interface to classify students confusion via hyperparameter tuning

Abstract

Brain-computer interface (BCI) research has gained increasing attention in educational contexts, offering the potential to monitor and enhance students’ cognitive states. Real-time classification of students’ confusion levels using electroencephalogram (EEG) data presents a significant challenge in this domain. Since real-time EEG data is dynamic and highly dimensional, current approaches have some limitations for predicting mental states based on this data. This paper introduces an optimal deep learning (DL) model for the BCI, ODL-BCI, optimized through hyperparameter tuning techniques to address the limitations of classifying students’ confusion in real time. Leveraging the “confused student EEG brainwave” dataset, we employ Bayesian optimization to fine-tune hyperparameters of the proposed DL model. The model architecture comprises input and output layers, with several hidden layers whose nodes, activation functions, and learning rates are determined utilizing selected hyperparameters. We evaluate and compare the proposed model with some state-of-the-art methods and standard machine learning (ML) classifiers, including Decision Tree, AdaBoost, Bagging, MLP, Naïve Bayes, Random Forest, SVM, and XG Boost, on the EEG confusion dataset. Our experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the optimized DL model, ODL-BCI. It boosts the accuracy between 4% and 9% over the current approaches, outperforming all other classifiers in the process. The ODL-BCI implementation source codes can be accessed by anyone at https://github.com/MdOchiuddinMiah/ODL-BCI.