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Performance enhancement of mental task classification using EEG signal: a study of multivariate feature selection methods

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Abstract

In the recent years, the research community has shown interest in the development of brain–computer interface applications which assist physically challenged people to communicate with their brain electroencephalogram (EEG) signal. Representation of these EEG signals for mental task classification in terms of relevant features is important to achieve higher performance in terms of accuracy and computation time. For feature extraction from the EEG, empirical mode decomposition and wavelet transform are more appropriate as they are suitable for the analysis of non-linear and non-stationary time series signals. However, the size of the feature vector obtained from them is huge and may hinder the performance of mental task classification. To obtain a minimal set of relevant and non-redundant features for classification, six popular multivariate filter methods have been investigated which are based on different criteria: distance measure, causal effect and mutual information. Experimental results demonstrate that the classification accuracy improves while the computation time reduces considerably with the use of each of the six multivariate feature selection methods. Among all the combinations of feature extraction and selection methods that are investigated, the combination of wavelet transform and linear regression performs the best. Ranking analysis and statistical tests are also performed to validate the empirical results.

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Notes

  1. http://www.cs.colostate.edu/eeg/main/data/1989_Keirn_and_Aunon.

  2. http://perso.enslyon.fr/patrick.flandrin/emd.html.

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Acknowledgments

The first author expresses his gratitude to the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), India, for the obtained financial support in performing this research work. We also thank the reviewers for the constructive and valuable review of our paper that has helped us to further strengthen the overall quality of the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer and Systems Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, 110067, India

    Akshansh Gupta & R. K. Agrawal

  2. Department of Computer Science, Hansraj College, University of Delhi, Delhi, 110007, India

    Baljeet Kaur

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  1. Akshansh Gupta
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  2. R. K. Agrawal
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  3. Baljeet Kaur
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Correspondence to Akshansh Gupta.

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Communicated by V. Loia.

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Gupta, A., Agrawal, R.K. & Kaur, B. Performance enhancement of mental task classification using EEG signal: a study of multivariate feature selection methods. Soft Comput 19, 2799–2812 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00500-014-1443-1

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