ous class is crucial for the success of the method and
we intend to improve this aspect in the future.
The fifth row in Table 3 shows the results with
the method described in Section 3. In this case, both
ideas, the transition detection and the moving win-
dow size, are used. Results improve significantly if
the moving window is used: classification accuracy
raises from 74.8 to 94.8 and from 74.6 to 86.3 (sub-
jects 1 and 2, respectively). It can also be seen that
results are also improved if a smaller window size is
used (MW with small sample).
Comparing our method with the best competition
result that used a window of samples (second row of
Table 3), we can see that our method is competitive
with respect to the first subject and improves the per-
formance for the second subject. Unfortunately our
method cannot be applied to the third subject due to
the large number of samples required for the window.
It can also be seen that using windows improves accu-
racy significatively (second, fifth, and sixth rows ver-
sus the first one of Table 3).
Table 3: Results for subjects 1, 2, and 3.
Subj. 1 Subj. 2 Subj. 3
BCI comp. (1 sec.) 79.60 70.31 56.02
BCI comp. (long window) 95.98 79.49 67.43
3-class classifier 74.8 60.7 50.2
Transition detector 80.8 74.6 52.2
Moving window 94.8 86.3 -
MW small sample 84.2 82.5 -
5 SUMMARY AND
CONCLUSIONS
Typically, in BCI classification problems EEG sam-
ples are classified at every instant in time indepen-
dently of previous samples. These samples run in
sequences belonging to the same class, and then fol-
lowed by a transition into a different class. We present
a method that takes this fact into consideration with
the aim of improving the classification accuracy. The
general classification problem is divided into two sub-
problems: detecting class transitions and determin-
ing the class between transitions. Class transitions
are detected by computing the Euclidean distance be-
tween PSD at two consecutive times; if the distance
is larger than a certain threshold then a class tran-
sition is detected. Threshold values are automati-
cally determined by the method. Once transitions
can be detected, the second subproblem -determining
the class between transitions- is considered. First,
since the class before the transition is known, it can
be discarded after the transition and therefore, a N-
class problem becomes a (N-1)-class problem, which
is easier. Second, sequences between two transitions
may contain many instances but only a few are nec-
essary to determine the class of the whole sequence.
In order to determine the class between transitions a
moving window is used to predict the class of each
testing instance in such a way that only the n last pre-
dictions before the testing instance are taken into ac-
count. The estimation of the window size (n) is based
on standard statistical theory.
This method has been applied to a high quality
dataset which had been previously precomputed, re-
sulting in a three-class classification problem with 96
input attributes. These data corresponds to three sub-
jects, with four sessions for each one: three for train-
ing and one for testing. Several experiments have
been done in order to validate the method and the ob-
tained results show that just by applying the transition
detector, the classification rates are better than when
a 3-class classifier is used. When the moving window
is used, the results are significatively better. Those
results are also competitive to those obtained in the
BCI competition: similar for subject 1, better for sub-
ject 2, and worse for subject 3. We also show that if
a smaller window size is used the classification rates
are also better than those that use only the transition
detector and the three-class classifier.
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