A latent discriminative model-based approach for classification of imaginary motor tasks from EEG data

We consider the problem of classification of imaginary motor tasks from electroencephalography (EEG) data for brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) and propose a new approach based on hidden conditional random fields (HCRFs). HCRFs are discriminative graphical models that are attractive for this problem because they (1) exploit the temporal structure of EEG; (2) include latent variables that can be used to model different brain states in the signal; and (3) involve learned statistical models matched to the classification task, avoiding some of the limitations of generative models. Our approach involves spatial filtering of the EEG signals and estimation of power spectra based on auto-regressive modeling of temporal segments of the EEG signals. Given this time-frequency representation, we select certain frequency bands that are known to be associated with execution of motor tasks. These selected features constitute the data that are fed to the HCRF, parameters of which are learned from training data. Inference algorithms on the HCRFs are used for classification of motor tasks. We experimentally compare this approach to the best performing methods in BCI competition IV as well as a number of more recent methods and observe that our proposed method yields better classification accuracy

FEATURE SELECTION APPLIED TO THE TIME-FREQUENCY REPRESENTATION OF MUSCLE NEAR-INFRARED SPECTROSCOPY (NIRS) SIGNALS: CHARACTERIZATION OF DIABETIC OXYGENATION PATTERNS

Diabetic patients might present peripheral microcirculation impairment and might benefit from physical training. Thirty-nine diabetic patients underwent the monitoring of the tibialis anterior muscle oxygenation during a series of voluntary ankle flexo-extensions by near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS). NIRS signals were acquired before and after training protocols. Sixteen control subjects were tested with the same protocol. Time-frequency distributions of the Cohen's class were used to process the NIRS signals relative to the concentration changes of oxygenated and reduced hemoglobin. A total of 24 variables were measured for each subject and the most discriminative were selected by using four feature selection algorithms: QuickReduct, Genetic Rough-Set Attribute Reduction, Ant Rough-Set Attribute Reduction, and traditional ANOVA. Artificial neural networks were used to validate the discriminative power of the selected features. Results showed that different algorithms extracted different sets of variables, but all the combinations were discriminative. The best classification accuracy was about 70%. The oxygenation variables were selected when comparing controls to diabetic patients or diabetic patients before and after training. This preliminary study showed the importance of feature selection techniques in NIRS assessment of diabetic peripheral vascular impairmen

Hidden conditional random fields for classification of imaginary motor tasks from EEG data

Brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are systems that allow the control of external devices using information extracted from brain signals. Such systems find application in rehabilitation of patients with limited or no muscular control. One mechanism used in BCIs is the imagination of motor activity, which produces variations on the power of the electroencephalography (EEG) signals recorded over the motor cortex. In this paper, we propose a new approach for classification of imaginary motor tasks based on hidden conditional random fields (HCRFs). HCRFs are discriminative graphical models that are attractive for this problem because they involve learned statistical models matched to the classification problem; they do not suffer from some of the limitations of generative models; and they include latent variables that can be used to model different brain states in the signal. Our approach involves auto-regressive modeling of the EEG signals, followed by the computation of the power spectrum. Frequency band selection is performed on the resulting time-frequency representation through feature selection methods. These selected features constitute the data that are fed to the HCRF, parameters of which are learned from training data. Inference algorithms on the HCRFs are used for classification of motor tasks. We experimentally compare this approach to the best performing methods in BCI competition IV and the results show that our approach overperforms all methods proposed in the competition. In addition, we present a comparison with an HMM-based method, and observe that the proposed method produces better classification accuracy

Discriminative methods for classification of asynchronous imaginary motor tasks from EEG data

In this work, two methods based on statistical models that take into account the temporal changes in the electroencephalographic (EEG) signal are proposed for asynchronous brain-computer interfaces (BCI) based on imaginary motor tasks. Unlike the current approaches to asynchronous BCI systems that make use of windowed versions of the EEG data combined with static classifiers, the methods proposed here are based on discriminative models that allow sequential labeling of data. In particular, the two methods we propose for asynchronous BCI are based on conditional random fields (CRFs) and latent dynamic CRFs (LDCRFs), respectively. We describe how the asynchronous BCI problem can be posed as a classification problem based on CRFs or LDCRFs, by defining appropriate random variables and their relationships. CRF allows modeling the extrinsic dynamics of data, making it possible to model the transitions between classes, which in this context correspond to distinct tasks in an asynchronous BCI system. On the other hand, LDCRF goes beyond this approach by incorporating latent variables that permit modeling the intrinsic structure for each class and at the same time allows modeling extrinsic dynamics. We apply our proposed methods on the publicly available BCI competition III dataset V as well as a data set recorded in our laboratory. Results obtained are compared to the top algorithm in the BCI competition as well as to methods based on hierarchical hidden Markov models (HHMMs), hierarchical hidden CRF (HHCRF), neural networks based on particle swarm optimization (IPSONN) and to a recently proposed approach based on neural networks and fuzzy theory, the S-dFasArt. Our experimental analysis demonstrates the improvements provided by our proposed methods in terms of classification accuracy

Neural Collective Entity Linking

Entity Linking aims to link entity mentions in texts to knowledge bases, and neural models have achieved recent success in this task. However, most existing methods rely on local contexts to resolve entities independently, which may usually fail due to the data sparsity of local information. To address this issue, we propose a novel neural model for collective entity linking, named as NCEL. NCEL applies Graph Convolutional Network to integrate both local contextual features and global coherence information for entity linking. To improve the computation efficiency, we approximately perform graph convolution on a subgraph of adjacent entity mentions instead of those in the entire text. We further introduce an attention scheme to improve the robustness of NCEL to data noise and train the model on Wikipedia hyperlinks to avoid overfitting and domain bias. In experiments, we evaluate NCEL on five publicly available datasets to verify the linking performance as well as generalization ability. We also conduct an extensive analysis of time complexity, the impact of key modules, and qualitative results, which demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed method.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures, COLING201