Baseline regularized sparse spatial filters

The common spatial pattern (CSP) method has large number of applications in brain machine interfaces (BMI) to extract features from the multichannel neural activity through a set of linear spatial projections. These spatial projections minimize the Rayleigh quotient (RQ) as the objective function, which is the variance ratio of the classes. The CSP method easily overfits the data when the number of training trials is not sufficiently large and it is sensitive to daily variation of multichannel electrode placement, which limits its applicability for everyday use in BMI systems. To overcome these problems, the amount of channels that is used in projections, should be limited to some adequate number. We introduce a spatially sparse projection (SSP) method that renders unconstrained minimization possible via a new objective function with an approximated ℓ₁ penalty. We apply our new algorithm with a baseline regularization to the ECoG data involving finger movements to gain stability with respect to the number of sparse channels.