Deep Belief Networks and Multiobjective Feature Selection for BCI with Multiresolution Analysis

High-dimensional pattern classification problems with a small number of training patterns are difficult. This paper deals with classification of motor imagery tasks for brain-computer interfacing (BCI), which is a hard problem involving a relatively small number of high-dimensional training patterns where curse of dimensionality issue has to be taken into account and feature selection is an important requirement to build a suitable classifier. Evolutionary metaheuristics for feature selection are usually more time-consuming than other alternatives, but their high performances in terms of classification accuracy make them desirable approaches. In this paper, feature selection through a wrapper procedure based on multi-objective optimization is compared with the use of deep belief networks (DBN) that constitute powerful classifiers implementing feature selection implicitly. Two different classifiers, LDA (linear discriminant analysis) and DBN, have been used to classify EEG signals with features extracted by multiresolution analysis (MRA) and selected by a multiobjective evolutionary method that also uses LDA to implement the fitness function of the solutions. The experimental results show that DBNs usually provide better or similar classification performances without requiring an explicit feature selection phase. Nevertheless, the DBN’s classification performance significantly decreases in problems with a very large number of features. Moreover, to achieve high classification rates, it is necessary to determine a suitable structure for the DBN. Therefore, in this paper we also propose a multiobjective approach to tackle this problem.