Feature learning from incomplete EEG with denoising autoencoder

An alternative pathway for the human brain to communicate with the outside world is by means of a brain computer interface (BCI). A BCI can decode electroencephalogram (EEG) signals of brain activities, and then send a command or an intent to an external interactive device, such as a wheelchair. The effectiveness of the BCI depends on the performance in decoding the EEG. Usually, the EEG is contaminated by different kinds of artefacts (e.g., electromyogram (EMG), background activity), which leads to a low decoding performance. A number of filtering methods can be utilized to remove or weaken the effects of artefacts, but they generally fail when the EEG contains extreme artefacts. In such cases, the most common approach is to discard the whole data segment containing extreme artefacts. This causes the fatal drawback that the BCI cannot output decoding results during that time. In order to solve this problem, we employ the Lomb–Scargle periodogram to estimate the spectral power from incomplete EEG (after removing only parts contaminated by artefacts), and Denoising Autoencoder (DAE) for learning. The proposed method is evaluated with motor imagery EEG data. The results show that our method can successfully decode incomplete EEG to good effect

Missing Features Reconstruction Using a Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Imputation Network

Missing data is one of the most common preprocessing problems. In this paper, we experimentally research the use of generative and non-generative models for feature reconstruction. Variational Autoencoder with Arbitrary Conditioning (VAEAC) and Generative Adversarial Imputation Network (GAIN) were researched as representatives of generative models, while the denoising autoencoder (DAE) represented non-generative models. Performance of the models is compared to traditional methods k-nearest neighbors (k-NN) and Multiple Imputation by Chained Equations (MICE). Moreover, we introduce WGAIN as the Wasserstein modification of GAIN, which turns out to be the best imputation model when the degree of missingness is less than or equal to 30%. Experiments were performed on real-world and artificial datasets with continuous features where different percentages of features, varying from 10% to 50%, were missing. Evaluation of algorithms was done by measuring the accuracy of the classification model previously trained on the uncorrupted dataset. The results show that GAIN and especially WGAIN are the best imputers regardless of the conditions. In general, they outperform or are comparative to MICE, k-NN, DAE, and VAEAC.Comment: Preprint of the conference paper (ICCS 2020), part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Scienc

Converting Your Thoughts to Texts: Enabling Brain Typing via Deep Feature Learning of EEG Signals

An electroencephalography (EEG) based Brain Computer Interface (BCI) enables people to communicate with the outside world by interpreting the EEG signals of their brains to interact with devices such as wheelchairs and intelligent robots. More specifically, motor imagery EEG (MI-EEG), which reflects a subjects active intent, is attracting increasing attention for a variety of BCI applications. Accurate classification of MI-EEG signals while essential for effective operation of BCI systems, is challenging due to the significant noise inherent in the signals and the lack of informative correlation between the signals and brain activities. In this paper, we propose a novel deep neural network based learning framework that affords perceptive insights into the relationship between the MI-EEG data and brain activities. We design a joint convolutional recurrent neural network that simultaneously learns robust high-level feature presentations through low-dimensional dense embeddings from raw MI-EEG signals. We also employ an Autoencoder layer to eliminate various artifacts such as background activities. The proposed approach has been evaluated extensively on a large- scale public MI-EEG dataset and a limited but easy-to-deploy dataset collected in our lab. The results show that our approach outperforms a series of baselines and the competitive state-of-the- art methods, yielding a classification accuracy of 95.53%. The applicability of our proposed approach is further demonstrated with a practical BCI system for typing.Comment: 10 page

Sleep Stage Classification: A Deep Learning Approach

Sleep occupies significant part of human life. The diagnoses of sleep related disorders are of great importance. To record specific physical and electrical activities of the brain and body, a multi-parameter test, called polysomnography (PSG), is normally used. The visual process of sleep stage classification is time consuming, subjective and costly. To improve the accuracy and efficiency of the sleep stage classification, automatic classification algorithms were developed. In this research work, we focused on pre-processing (filtering boundaries and de-noising algorithms) and classification steps of automatic sleep stage classification. The main motivation for this work was to develop a pre-processing and classification framework to clean the input EEG signal without manipulating the original data thus enhancing the learning stage of deep learning classifiers. For pre-processing EEG signals, a lossless adaptive artefact removal method was proposed. Rather than other works that used artificial noise, we used real EEG data contaminated with EOG and EMG for evaluating the proposed method. The proposed adaptive algorithm led to a significant enhancement in the overall classification accuracy. In the classification area, we evaluated the performance of the most common sleep stage classifiers using a comprehensive set of features extracted from PSG signals. Considering the challenges and limitations of conventional methods, we proposed two deep learning-based methods for classification of sleep stages based on Stacked Sparse AutoEncoder (SSAE) and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). The proposed methods performed more efficiently by eliminating the need for conventional feature selection and feature extraction steps respectively. Moreover, although our systems were trained with lower number of samples compared to the similar studies, they were able to achieve state of art accuracy and higher overall sensitivity

CLASSIFICATION OF EEG SIGNAL BY METHODS OF MACHINE LEARNING

Electroencephalogram (EEG) signal of two healthy subjects that was available from literature, was studied using the methods of machine learning, namely, decision trees (DT), multilayer perceptron (MLP), K-nearest neighbours (kNN), and support vector machines (SVM). Since the data were imbalanced, the appropriate balancing was performed by Kmeans clustering algorithm. The original and balanced data were classified by means of the mentioned above 4 methods. It was found, that SVM showed the best result for the both datasets in terms of accuracy. MLP and kNN produce the comparable results which are almost the same. DT accuracies are the lowest for the given dataset, with 83.82% for the original data and 61.48% for the balanced data