Temporal Modeling of EEG Signals using Block Sparse Variational Bayes Framework

Abstract

Compressed Sensing (CS) has emerged as an alternate method to acquire high dimensional signals effectively by exploiting the sparsity assumption. However, owing to non-sparse and non-stationary nature, it is extremely difficult to process Electroencephalograph (EEG) signals using CS paradigm. The success of Bayesian algorithms in recovering non-sparse signals has triggered the research in CS based models for neurophysiological signal processing. In this paper, we address the problem of Temporal Modeling of EEG Signals using Block Sparse Variational Bayes (SVB) Framework. Temporal correlation of EEG signals is modeled blockwise using normal variance scale mixtures parameterized via some random and deterministic parameters. Variational inference is exploited to infer the random parameters and Expectation Maximization (EM) is used to obtain the estimate of deterministic parameters. To validate the framework, we present experimental results for benchmark State Visual Evoked Potential (SSVEP) dataset with 40-target Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) speller using two frequency recognition algorithms viz. Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) and L1-regularized Multiway CCA. Results show that the proposed temporal model is highly useful in processing SSVEP-EEG signals irrespective of the recognition algorithms used.