Questionable Classification Accuracy Reported in “Designing a Sum of Squared Correlations Framework for Enhancing SSVEP-Based BCIs”

This commentary presents a replication study to verify the effectiveness of a sum of squared correlations (SSCOR)-based steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs) decoding method proposed by Kumar et al.. We implemented the SSCOR-based method in accordance with their descriptions and estimated its classification accuracy using a benchmark SSVEP dataset with cross validation. Our results showed significantly lower classification accuracy compared with the ones reported in Kumar et al.'s study. We further investigated the sources of performance discrepancy by simulating data leakage between training and test datasets. The classification performance of the simulation was remarkably similar to those reported by Kumar et al.. We, therefore, question the validity of evaluation and conclusions drawn in Kumar et al.'s study.