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Abstract. We applied Random Forest (RF) classifiers on electroencephalographic (EEG) data of right hand vs.
feet motor imagery (MI) and achieved a cross-validation classification accuracy of 79% on average over 10
participants. Furthermore, we used the intrinsic Gini Index (GI) based feature rating mechanism of the RF
classifiers to find most discriminative features and compared them to the differences in the event related
desynchronization/synchronization (ERD/S) maps between the classes. We found mu and beta band measured at
position C3 most important for classification, which is in line with current state of knowledge.
Keywords: BCI, EEG, ERD/S, Motor Imagery, Random Forests, Feature ranking
1. Introduction
One crucial issue to achieve good on-line performance in sensory motor rhythm (SMR) Brain-Computer
Interfaces (BCI) is the selection of the most discriminative oscillatory components. In this work we study the
usefulness of the Random Forests (RF) ensemble classifier for classifying electroencephalographic (EEG) motor
imagery (MI) data. RF classifiers are interesting because in other areas they achieve high classification
accuracies and they have a built in feature rating mechanism, which can be useful for checking the validity of the
selected features. Furthermore, RF are robust against outliers and can handle high dimensional input variables. In
this work, we perform offline analysis of right hand vs. feet MI data and compare the feature rating results with
event related desynchronization /synchronization (ERD/S) maps.
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3. Results
The CV results and the correlation coefficients of each participant are presented in Table 1. Figure 1 shows
one example of the calculated maps and the average GI feature rating over all participants.
Table 1. Peak cross-validation accuracies of RF classifiers and correlation coefficients between RF classifiers feature
rating and significant (99% confidence interval) differences of ERD/S time/frequency maps of the classes right hand vs.
feet (n.s. not significant).
Participant
S1
S2
S3
S4
S5
S6
S7
S8
S9
S10
Mean
RF
94%
70%
75%
86%
91%
64%
70%
85%
74%
80%
79%
Corr. coeff. (p<0.001)
0.45
n.s.
n.s.
0.34
0.16
0.44
n.s.
0.17
0.12
0.71
0.34
Figure 1. 1a) GI rating map for right hand vs. feet MI of participant S10. Each time segment was individually analysed. 1b)
difference of ERD/S time/frequency maps between right hand and feet MI for participant S10. 1c) average GI
ranking average over all participants. Note: Color coding of the maps is not compareable, because the color was
normalized to the maximum value of the respective map.
4. Discussion
RFs were successfully applied to EEG data for single trial classification of MI. We computed an average
peak accuracy of 79%. For comparison DSLVQ achieved 81% [Mller-Putz, 2010]. The training of the classifier
and the calculation of the ratings was reasonable fast with about 1 s per classifier. The time for classifying one
sample was less than 0.05 s. The top rated features for MI were in average the frequencies in the mu and in the
beta band of channel C3 (Fig. 1c). Moreover, in average there were important features on the ipsilateral side
(C4), which is in line with literature [Pfurtscheller, 1997, 2001]. Although there is a noticeable similarity
between the GI rankings (Fig. 1a) and the differences of ERD/S maps (Fig. 1b), the computed correlation
coefficients (Tab. 1) were low. A possible cause is that significant differences of ERD/S maps were rather spots
than sustained due to the low resolution of the maps and the assessment of ERD/S differences to certain
frequencies can slight vary between ranking and difference maps due to the dissimilar calculation methods (FFT
vs. band passing).
Summing up, Random Forests classify motor imageries in EEG and are able to find neurophysiological
reasonable features. We are currently working on an online study using RFs and first results are promising.
References
Breiman L, Friedman J H, Olshen R A, Stone C J, CART: Classification and Regression Trees. Wadsworth: Belmont, CA, 1983.
Breiman L, Random Forests, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Machine Learning, 45: 5-32, 2001.
Mller-Putz G R, Scherer R, Pfurtscheller G, Neuper C, Temporal coding of brain patterns for direct limb control in humans. Frontiers in
Neuroscience: 4-34, 2010.
Pfurtscheller G, Neuper C, Motor imagery activates primary sensorimotor area in humans, Neuroscience Letters 239: 65-68, 1997.
Pfurtscheller G, Neuper C, Motor imagery and direct brain-computer communication, Proceeding IEEE, 89 no. 5: 11231134, 2001.
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