Ensemble Support Vector Recurrent Neural Network for Brain Signal Detection

The brain–computer interface (BCI) P300 speller analyzes the P300 signals from the brain to achieve direct communication between humans and machines, which can assist patients with severe disabilities to control external machines or robots to complete expected tasks. Therefore, the classification method of P300 signals plays an important role in the development of BCI systems and technologies. In this article, a novel ensemble support vector recurrent neural network (E-SVRNN) framework is proposed and developed to acquire more accurate and efficient electroencephalogram (EEG) signal classification results. First, we construct a support vector machine (SVM) to formulate EEG signals recognizing model. Second, the SVM formulation is transformed into a standard convex quadratic programming (QP) problem. Third, the convex QP problem is solved by combining a varying parameter recurrent neural network (VPRNN) with a penalty function. Experimental results on BCI competition II and BCI competition III datasets demonstrate that the proposed E-SVRNN framework can achieve accuracy rates as high as 100% and 99%, respectively. In addition, the results of comparison experiments verify that the proposed E-SVRNN possesses the best recognition accuracy and information transfer rate (ITR) compared with most of the state-of-the-art algorithms.