A Simple Subject Independent Channel Selection in EEG for Motor Imagery Task

Classification of motor imagery (MI) tasks through EEG is valuable in brain-computer interfacing and rehabilitation engineering. EEG channels selection for MI task classification is well discussed problem and is challenging due to its combinatorial nature. Most of the existing methods are subject and task-dependent. This paper introduces a subject-independent EEG channel selection. The proposed approach consists of two stages. First, we rank channels based on their divergence from a reference channel Cz. We hypothesize that channels less divergent from Cz are more relevant for MI task classification. In the second stage, we employ a three-stage feature selection and classification model to evaluate the selected channels. It consists of a bandpass filter, followed by common spatial pattern (CSP) filter and three classifiers viz. SVM, 1-NN and 5-NN. Two publicly available datasets viz. PhysioNet and BCI Competition III IVa datasets have been used to assess the method. It performs 15.21\% more than 3Cs and just 2.91\% less than all-channels accuracy with as few as 20/118 channels on BCI Competition data and 19.64\% more than 3Cs on the PhysioNet dataset with 16/64 channels. Empirical comparison implies that the method performs better than classical models such as CSP Rank, fishers rank, and normalized mutual information, significantly. Results support that our hypothesis that divergence between channels and a reference channel Cz can be used as a ranking measure for channel selection.