Trial pruning for classification of single-trial EEG data during motor imagery

Due to the artifacts in electroencephalography (EEG) data, the performance of brain-computer interface (BCI) is degraded. On the other hand, in the motor imagery based BCI system, EEG signals are usually contaminated by the misleading trials caused by improper imagination of a movement. In this paper, we present a novel algorithm to detect the abnormal EEG data using genetic algorithm (GA). After trial pruning, a subset of the EEG data are selected, on which common spatial pattern (CSP) and Gaussian classifier are trained. The performance of the proposed method is tested on Data set IIa of BCI Competition IV, and the simulation result demonstrates a significant improvement for six out of nine subjects.