Cultural-based multi-objective particle swarm optimization for EEG channel reduction in multi-class brain-computer interfaces

Applying many electrodes is undesirable for real-life brain-computer interface (BCI) application since the recording preparation can be troublesome and time-consuming. Multi-objective particle swarm optimization (MOPSO) has been widely utilized to solve multi-objective optimization problems and thus can be employed for channel selection. This paper presented a novel method named cultural-based MOPSO (CMOPSO) for channel selection in motor imagery based BCI. The CMOPSO method introduces a cultural framework to adapt the personalized flight parameters of the mutated particles. A comparison between the proposed algorithm and typical L1-norm algorithm was conducted, and the results showed that the proposed approach is more effective in selecting a smaller subset of channels while maintaining the classification accuracy unreduced.