A novel approach to enhancing biomedical signal recognition via hybrid high-order information bottleneck driven spiking neural networks

Biomedical signals, encapsulating vital physiological information, are pivotal in elucidating human traits and conditions, serving as a cornerstone for advancing human–machine interfaces. Nonetheless, the fidelity of biomedical signal interpretation is frequently compromised by pervasive noise sources such as skin, motion, and equipment interference, posing formidable challenges to precision recognition tasks. Concurrently, the burgeoning adoption of intelligent wearable devices illuminates a societal shift towards enhancing life and work through technological integration. This surge in popularity underscores the imperative for efficient, noise-resilient biomedical signal recognition methodologies, a quest that is both challenging and profoundly impactful. This study proposes a novel approach to enhancing biomedical signal recognition. The proposed approach employs a hierarchical information bottleneck mechanism within SNNs, quantifying the mutual information in different orders based on the depth of information flow in the network. Subsequently, these mutual information, together with the network’s output and category labels, are restructured based on information theory principles to form the loss function used for training. A series of theoretical analyses and substantial experimental results have shown that this method can effectively compress noise in the data, and on the premise of low computational cost, it can also significantly outperform its vanilla counterpart in terms of classification performance.