Evaluation of Empirical Mode Decomposition for Event-Related Potential Analysis

Current methods for estimating event-related potentials (ERPs) assume stationarity of the signal. Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) is a data-driven decomposition technique that does not assume stationarity. We evaluated an EMD-based method for estimating the ERP. On simulated data, EMD substantially reduced background EEG while retaining the ERP. EMD-denoised single trials also estimated shape, amplitude, and latency of the ERP better than raw single trials. On experimental data, EMD-denoised trials revealed event-related differences between two conditions (condition A and B) more effectively than trials lowpass filtered at 40Hz. EMD also revealed event-related differences on both condition A and condition B that were clearer and of longer duration than those revealed by low-pass filtering at 40Hz. Thus, EMD-based denoising is a promising data-driven, nonstationary method for estimating ERPs and should be investigated further.