Optimal EEG Channel Selection by Genetic Algorithm and Binary PSO based on a Support Vector Machine

Abstract: BCI (Brain-Computer Interface) is a system that transforms a subject’s brain signal related to their intention into a control signal by classifying EEG (electroencephalograph) signals obtained during the imagination of movement of a subject’s limbs. The BCI system allows us to control machines such as robot arms or wheelchairs only by imaging limbs. With the exact same experiment environment, activated brain regions of each subjects are totally different. In that case, a simple approach is to use as many channels as possible when measuring brain signals. However the problem is that using many channels also causes other problems. When applying a CSP (Common Spatial Pattern), which is an EEG extraction method, many channels cause an overfitting problem, and in addition there is difficulty using this technique for medical analysis. To overcome these problems, we suggest an optimal channel selection method using a BPSO (Binary Particle Swarm Optimization), BPSO with channel impact factor, and GA. This paper examined optimal selected channels among all channels using three optimization methods and compared the classification accuracy and the number of selected channels between BPSO, BPSO with channel impact factor, and GA by SVM (Support Vector Machine). The result showed that BPSO with channel impact factor selected 2 fewer channels and even improved accuracy by 10.17~11.34% compared with BPSO and GA.Keywords: brain-computer interface, binary particle swarm optimization, genetic algorithm, support vector machine