Extremely Reduced Data Sets Indicate Optimal Stimulation Parameters for Classification in Brain-Computer Interfaces.

Journal: Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society. Annual International Conference
Published Date:

Abstract

The time between the onset of subsequent auditory or visual stimuli - also known as stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) - determines many of the event-related potential characteristics of the resulting evoked brain signals. Specifically, the SOA value influences the performance of an individual subject in brain-computer interface (BCI) applications like spellers. In the past, subject-specific optimization of the SOA was rarely considered in BCI studies. Our research strives to reduce the time requirements of individual BCI stimulus parameter optimization. This work contributes to this goal in two ways. First, we show that even the classification performance on extremely reduced training data subsets reveals the influence of SOA. Second, we show, that these noisy estimates are sufficient to make decisions for individual choices of the SOA that transfer to good classification performance on large training data sets. Thus our work contributes to individually tailored SOA selection procedures for BCI users.

Authors

  • Jan Sosulski
  • Michael Tangermann
    Brain State Decoding Lab, Cluster of Excellence BrainLinks-BrainTools, Department of Computer Science, Albert-Ludwigs-University, Freiburg, Germany.