An Explainable and Generalizable Recurrent Neural Network Approach for Differentiating Human Brain States on EEG Dataset.

Journal: IEEE transactions on neural networks and learning systems
Published Date:

Abstract

Electroencephalogram (EEG) is one of the most widely used brain computer interface (BCI) approaches. Despite the success of existing EEG approaches in brain state recognition studies, it is still challenging to differentiate brain states via explainable and generalizable deep learning approaches. In other words, how to explore meaningful and distinguishing features and how to overcome the huge variability and overfitting problem still need to be further studied. To alleviate these challenges, in this work, a multiple random fragment search-based multilayer recurrent neural network (MRFS-MRNN) is proposed to improve the differentiating performance and explore meaningful patterns. Specifically, an explainable MRNN module is proposed to capture the temporal dependences preserved in EEG time series. Besides, a MRFS module is designed to cut multiple random fragments from the entire EEG signal time course to improve the effectiveness of brain state differentiating ability. MRFS-MRNN is concatenatedto effectively overcome the huge variabilities and overfitting problems. Experiment results demonstrate that the proposed MRFS-MRNN model not only has excellent differentiating performance, but also has good explanation and generalization ability. The classification accuracies reach as high as 95.18% for binary classification and 89.19% for four-category classification on the individual level. Similarly, 95.53% and 85.84% classification accuracies are obtained for the binary and four-category classification on the group level. What's more, 94.28% and 85.43% classification accuracies of binary and four-category classifications are achieved for predicting brand new subjects. The experiment results showed that the proposed method outperformed other state-of-the-art (SOTA) models on the same underlying data and improved the explanation and generalization ability.

Authors

  • Shu Zhang
    State University of New York, Department of Radiology, Stony Brook, New York, United States.
  • Lin Wu
    Key Laboratory of Grain and Oil Processing and Food Safety of Sichuan Province, College of Food and Bioengineering, Xihua University Chengdu 610039 China xingyage1@163.com.
  • Sigang Yu
    Center for Brain and Brain-Inspired Computing Research, Department of Computer Science, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an, China.
  • Enze Shi
    Center for Brain and Brain-Inspired Computing Research, School of Computer Science, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi'an 710000, China.
  • Ning Qiang
    School of Physics and Information Technology, Shaanxi Normal University, Xi'an, China.
  • Huan Gao
    College of Pharmacy, Shaanxi University of Chinese Medicine, Xianyang 712046, China.
  • Jingyi Zhao
    School of Automotive Studies, Tongji University, No.4800, Cao-an Road, Shanghai, 201804, China.
  • Shijie Zhao