Classification of motor imagery EEG with ensemble RNCA model

Abstract

Motor Imagery (MI) based brain-computer interface (BCI) systems are used for regaining the motor functions of neurophysiologically affected persons. But the performance of MI tasks is degraded due to the presence of redundant EEG channels. Hence, a novel ensemble regulated neighborhood component analysis (ERNCA) method provides a perfect identification of neural region that stimulate motor movements. Domains of statistical, frequency, spatial and transform-based features narrowed down the misclassification rate. The gradient boosting method selects the relevant features thereby reduces the computational complexity. Finally, Bayesian optimized ensemble classifier finetuned the classification accuracies of 97.22 % and 91.62 % for Datasets IIIa and IVa respectively. This approach is further strengthened by analyzing real-time data with the accuracy of 93.75 %. This method qualifies out of four benchmark methods with significant percent of improvement in accuracy for these three datasets. As per the spatial distribution of refined EEG channels, majority of the brain's motor functions concentrates on frontal and central cortex regions of brain.