Domain Transfer Multiple Kernel Boosting for Classification of EEG Motor Imagery Signals

The application of wireless sensors in the brain–computer interface (BCI) system provides great convenience for the acquisition of electroencephalography (EEG) signals. However, a large amount of training data is needed to build the classification architectures used in motor imagery (MI) brain–computer interface (BCI), which is time-consuming to generate. To address this issue, transfer learning has gained significant attention in a small sample setting BCI system. The transfer learning methods have shown promising results by leveraging labeled patterns from the source domain to learn robust classifiers for the target domain, which has only a limited number of labeled samples. However, the successful application of such approaches in a motor imagery BCI remains limited. In this paper, we present a novel framework called domain transfer multiple kernel boosting (DTMKB), which extends the DTMKL algorithms by applying boosting techniques for learning kernel-based classifiers with the transfer of multiple kernels. Based on the proposed framework, we examined their empirical performance in comparison to several state-of-the-art algorithms on two MI task datasets. DTMKB yields the best performance for all datasets and achieves the best average classification accuracy 87.60%, 76.00%, 74.66%, and 74.13%, respectively. In particular, the proposed framework can be applied successfully in a small sample of EEG motor imagery signals.