Classification of EEG Motor Imagery Using Support Vector Machine and Convolutional Neural Network

In this study, we used two machine learning algorithms, namely, linear support vector machine (SVM) and convolutional neural network (CNN), to classify the BCI (Brain Computer interface) competition IV-2a 2-class MI (motor imagery) data set which consists of EEG data from 9 subjects. For each subject, 5 sessions of signals from three electrodes (C3, Cz, and C4) were recorded with sampling rate 250Hz. The training data, which consisted of the first 3 sessions, included 400 trials. The evaluation data, which consisted of the last 2 sessions, included 320 trials. Each trial started with gazing at fix cross on screen for 3 seconds followed by a one-second visual cue pointing either to the left or right to instruct the subject for left or right motor imagery over a period of 4 seconds, and then followed by a short break of at least 1.5 seconds. Features were extracted from the 0.5 to 2.5 second signals after the cue for each trial from C3 and C4. Each EEG trial was band pass filtered into different frequency bands, namely, delta (0.5-3Hz), theta (4-8Hz), alpha (8-12Hz), beta bands (13-30Hz), gamma bands (31-60Hz). Those filtered signals were then used as the input data for training the linear SVM. In addition, we generated a 2 by 500 matrix by down sampling the training data from each trial. There are 5760 such matrices in total generated from all subjects and serve as the input data for training CNN and the trained model was evaluated by another 340 matrices from each subject. Our CNN architecture consisted of 2 convolution layer and 2 fully connect layers, and there was a batch normalization layer before the activated layer and a dropout layer with a probability of 50% after the activated layer. The classification accuracies evaluated by averaged kappa values obtained from linear SVM and CNN are 0.5 and 0.621, respectively, suggesting the deep learning CNN method is superior to the classical linear SVM on the EEG classification.