Classification of Motor Imagery Using Combination of Feature Extraction and Reduction Methods for Brain-Computer Interface

Abstract

The motor imagery (MI) based brain-computer interface systems (BCIs) can help with new communication ways. A typical electroencephalography (EEG)-based BCI system consists of several components including signal acquisition, signal pre-processing, feature extraction and feature classification. This paper focuses on the feature extraction step and proposes to use a combination of different feature extraction and feature reduction methods. The research presented in the paper explores the methods of band power, time domain parameters, fast Fourier transform and channel variance for feature extraction. These methods are investigated by combining them in pairs. The application of two feature extraction methods increases the number of selected features that can be redundant or irrelevant. The utilization of too many features can lead to wrong classification results. Therefore, the methods of feature reduction have to be applied. The following feature reduction methods are investigated: principal component analysis, sequential forward selection, sequential backward selection, locality preserving projections and local Fisher discriminant analysis. The combination of the methods of fast Fourier transform, channel variance and principal component analysis performed the best among the combinations of methods. The obtained classification accuracy of the above-mentioned combination of the methods is much higher than that of the individual feature extraction method. The novelty of the approach is based on consolidated sequence of methods for feature extraction and feature reduction.