Selection of effective EEG channels in brain computer interfaces based on inconsistencies of classifiers

This paper proposed a novel method to select the effective Electroencephalography (EEG) channels for the motor imagery tasks based on the inconsistencies from multiple classifiers. The inconsistency criterion for channel selection was designed based on the fluctuation of the classification accuracies among different classifiers when the noisy channels were included. These noisy channels were then identified and removed till a required number of channels was selected or a predefined classification accuracy with reference to baseline was obtained. Experiments conducted on a data set of 13 healthy subjects performing hand grasping and idle revealed that the EEG channels from the motor area were most frequently selected. Furthermore, the mean increases of 4.07%, 3.10% and 1.77% of the averaged accuracies in comparison with the four existing channel selection methods were achieved for the non-feedback, feedback and calibration sessions, respectively, by selecting as low as seven channels. These results further validated the effectiveness of our proposed method.