Inter-subject deep transfer learning for motor imagery EEG decoding
Author(s)
Wei, Xiaoxi
Ortega, Pablo
Faisal, Aldo
Type
Conference Paper
Abstract
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have be-come a powerful technique to decode EEG and have become the benchmark for motor imagery EEG Brain-Computer-Interface (BCI) decoding. However, it is still challenging to train CNNs on multiple subjects’ EEG without decreasing individual performance. This is known as the negative transfer problem, i.e. learning from dissimilar distributions causes CNNs to misrepresent each of them instead of learning a richer representation. As a result, CNNs cannot directly use multiple subjects’ EEG to enhance model performance directly. To address this problem, we extend deep transfer learning techniques to the EEG multi-subject training case. We propose a multi-branch deep transfer network, the Separate-Common-Separate Network (SCSN) based on splitting the network’s feature extractors for individual subjects. We also explore the possibility of applying Maximum-mean discrepancy (MMD) to the SCSN (SCSN-MMD) to better align distributions of features from individual feature extractors. The proposed network is evaluated on the BCI Competition IV 2a dataset (BCICIV2adataset) and our online recorded dataset. Results show that the proposed SCSN (81.8%, 53.2%) and SCSN-MMD (81.8%,54.8%) outperformed the benchmark CNN (73.4%, 48.8%) on both datasets using multiple subjects. Our proposed networks show the potential to utilise larger multi-subject datasets to train an EEG decoder without being influenced by negative transfer.
Date Issued
2021-06-02
Date Acceptance
2021-02-21
Citation
2021 10th International IEEE/EMBS Conference on Neural Engineering (NER), 2021, pp.1-4
Publisher
IEEE
Start Page
1
End Page
4
Journal / Book Title
2021 10th International IEEE/EMBS Conference on Neural Engineering (NER)
Copyright Statement
© 2022 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. See http://www.ieee.org/publications_standards/publications/rights/index.html for more information.
Source
10th International IEEE EMBS Conference on Neural Engineering (NER 21)
Subjects
Science & Technology
Technology
Life Sciences & Biomedicine
Computer Science, Theory & Methods
Engineering, Biomedical
Neurosciences
Computer Science
Engineering
Neurosciences & Neurology
brain-computer-interface
EEG
multi-subject
deep learning
transfer learning
online decoding
Publication Status
Published
Start Date
2021-05-04
Finish Date
2021-05-06
Coverage Spatial
Virtual