Motor Imagery EEG Classification Based on Multi-Domain Feature Rotation and Stacking Ensemble.

Abstract

Background: Decoding motor intentions from electroencephalogram (EEG) signals is a critical component of motor imagery-based brain-computer interface (MI-BCIs). In traditional EEG signal classification, effectively utilizing the valuable information contained within the electroencephalogram is crucial.

Objectives: To further optimize the use of information from various domains, we propose a novel framework based on multi-domain feature rotation transformation and stacking ensemble for classifying MI tasks.

Methods: Initially, we extract the features of Time Domain, Frequency domain, Time-Frequency domain, and Spatial Domain from the EEG signals, and perform feature selection for each domain to identify significant features that possess strong discriminative capacity. Subsequently, local rotation transformations are applied to the significant feature set to generate a rotated feature set, enhancing the representational capacity of the features. Next, the rotated features were fused with the original significant features from each domain to obtain composite features for each domain. Finally, we employ a stacking ensemble approach, where the prediction results of base classifiers corresponding to different domain features and the set of significant features undergo linear discriminant analysis for dimensionality reduction, yielding discriminative feature integration as input for the meta-classifier for classification.

Results: The proposed method achieves average classification accuracies of 92.92%, 89.13%, and 86.26% on the BCI Competition III Dataset IVa, BCI Competition IV Dataset I, and BCI Competition IV Dataset 2a, respectively.

Conclusions: Experimental results show that the method proposed in this paper outperforms several existing MI classification methods, such as the Common Time-Frequency-Spatial Patterns and the Selective Extract of the Multi-View Time-Frequency Decomposed Spatial, in terms of classification accuracy and robustness.