Validation of Model-Basis Transfer Learning for a Personalized Electroencephalogram-Based Emotion-Classification Model*

The electroencephalogram (EEG)-based affective brain-computer interface (aBCI) has attracted extensive attention in multidisciplinary fields in the past decade. However, the inherent variability of emotional responses recorded in EEG signals increases the vulnerability of pre-trained machine-learning models and impedes the applicability of aBCIs with real-life settings. To overcome the shortcomings associated with the limited personal data in affective modeling, this study proposes a model-basis transfer learning (TL) approach and verifies its feasibility to construct a personalized model using less emotion-annotated data in a longitudinal eight-day dataset comprising data on 10 subjects. By performing daily reliability testing, the proposed TL approach outperformed the subject-dependent counterpart (using limited data only) by ~6% in binary valence classification after recycling a compact set of the eight most transferable models from other subjects. These empirical findings practically contribute to progress in applying TL in realistic aBCI applications.Clinical Relevance— The proposed model-basis TL approach overcomes the shortcoming of inherent variability in EEG signals, supporting realistic aBCI applications.