Identifying optimal channels and features for multi-participant motor imagery experiments across a participant’s multi-day multi-class EEG data

The concept of the brain-computer interface (BCI) has become one of the popular research topics of recent times because it allows people to express their thoughts and control different applications and devices without actual movement. The communication between the brain and the computer or a machine is generally provided through Electroencephalogram (EEG) signals because they are cost-effective and easy to implement in normal life, not just in healthcare facilities. On the other hand, they are hard to process efficiently due to their nonlinearity and noisy nature. Thus, the field of BCI and EEG needs constant work and improvement. This paper focuses on generalizing the most efficient EEG channels and the most significant features of motor imagery (MI) signals by analyzing the recordings of one participant obtained over 20 different days. Because the classification performance usually decreases with an increasing number of class labels, we have realized the study by analyzing the signals through a new paradigm consisting of multi-class directional labels: right, left, forward, and backward. Afterward, the results are tested on EEG data obtained from 5 participants to see if the results are consistent with each other. The average accuracy of binary and multi-class classification using the Ensemble Subspace Discriminant classifier was found as 87.39 and 61.44%, respectively, with the most efficient 3-channel combination for daily BCI evaluation of one participant. On the other hand, the average accuracy of binary and multi-class classification was found as 71.84 and 50.42%, respectively, for 5 participants, with the most efficient channel combination of 4, where the first three are the same as the daily performance of one participant. During signal processing, the outliers of the signals were discarded by considering the channels separately. An algorithm was developed to dismiss the inconsistent samples within the classes. A novel adaptive filtering approach, correlation-based adaptive variational mode decomposition (CBAVMD), was proposed. The feature selection was realized based on the standard deviation values of the features between the classes. The paradigm based on the direction movements was found to be most effective, especially for binary classification of right and left directions. The generalization of effective channels and features was found to be generally successful.