Semi-supervised adaptation of motor imagery based BCI systems

One of the main problems in Brain Computer Interface (BCI) systems is the non-stationary behavior of the electroencephalography (EEG) signals causing problems in real time applications. Another common problem in BCI systems is the situation where the labeled data are scarce. In this study, we take a semi-supervised learning perspective and propose solving both types of problems by updating the BCI system with labels obtained from the outputs of the classifier. To test the approach, data from motor imagery BCI system are used. Attributes extracted from EEG signals are classified with Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) and Support Vector Machines (SVM). With respect to the static classifiers, accuracy was improved approximately 4% using the proposed adaptation approach in the case of a training dataset. Even though the difference between the performance of static and adaptive classifiers decreases as the size of training data increases, the accuracy of our proposed adaptive classifier remains higher. The proposed approach has also improved the performance of a BCI system around 4% in the case of non-stationary signals as well.