Evolutionary Approach for Selection of Optimal EEG Electrode Positions and Features for Classification of Cognitive Tasks

This paper proposes a novel evolutionary approach to the optimal selection of electrodes as well as relevant EEG features for effective classification of cognitive tasks. The problem has been formulated in the framework of a single objective optimization problem with an aim to simultaneously satisfy three criteria. The first criterion deals with maximization of the correlation between the features of EEG sources before and after the selection of the optimal electrodes. The second criterion is concerned with minimization of the mutual information between the features of the selected EEG electrodes. The last criterion aims at maximization of the ratio of the difference between the selected features of the EEG sources between and within any two cognitive tasks. A self-adaptive variant of firefly algorithm is proposed to solve the above optimization problem by proficiently balancing the trade-off between the computational accuracy and the run-time complexity. Experiments undertaken over wide variety of cognitive tasks reveal that the proposed algorithm outperforms the other standard algorithms (applied to the same problem) in terms of accuracy and computational overhead.