Improving brain-computer interface classification using adaptive common spatial patterns

Common Spatial Patterns (CSP) is a widely used spatial filtering technique for electroencephalography (EEG)-based brain-computer interface (BCI). It is a two-class supervised technique that needs subject-specific training data. Due to EEG nonstationarity, EEG signal may exhibit significant intra- and inter-subject variation. As a result, spatial filters learned from a subject may not perform well for data acquired from the same subject at a different time or from other subjects performing the same task. Studies have been performed to improve CSP's performance by adding regularization terms into the training. Most of them require target subjects' training data with known class labels. In this work, an adaptive CSP (ACSP) method is proposed to analyze single trial EEG data from single and multiple subjects. The method does not estimate target data's class labels during the adaptive learning and updates spatial filters for both classes simultaneously. The proposed method was evaluated based on a comparison study with the classic CSP and several CSP-based adaptive methods using motor imagery EEG data from BCI competitions. Experimental results indicate that the proposed method can improve the classification performance as compared to the other methods. For circumstances where true class labels of target data are not instantly available, it was examined if adding classified target data to training data would improve the ACSP learning. Experimental results show that it would be better to exclude them from the training data. The proposed ACSP method can be performed in real-time and is potentially applicable to various EEG-based BCI applications. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.