An evaluation of pdi-Boosting for brain-computer interfaces

Brain-computer interface (BCI) technologies have recently entered the research limelight. In many such systems, external computers and machines are controlled by brain activity signals measured using near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) or electroencephalograph (EEG) devices. In this paper, we evaluate the boosting algorithm for BCI using simple numerical examples where we add various amounts of disturbances. In pdi-Boosting, interpolated data is generated around classification errors using a probability distribution function. By using the interpolated data, the discriminated boundary is shown to control the external machine effectively. We verify our boosting method with an experiment in which NIRS data is obtained from subjects performing a basic arithmetic task, and discuss the results.