Exploiting the Cone of Influence for Improving the Performance of Wavelet Transform-Based Models for ERP/EEG Classification

Features extracted from the wavelet transform coefficient matrix are widely used in the design of machine learning models to classify event-related potential (ERP) and electroencephalography (EEG) signals in a wide range of brain activity research and clinical studies. This novel study is aimed at dramatically improving the performance of such wavelet-based classifiers by exploiting information offered by the cone of influence (COI) of the continuous wavelet transform (CWT). The COI is a boundary that is superimposed on the wavelet scalogram to delineate the coefficients that are accurate from those that are inaccurate due to edge effects. The features derived from the inaccurate coefficients are, therefore, unreliable. In this study, it is hypothesized that the classifier performance would improve if unreliable features, which are outside the COI, are zeroed out, and the performance would improve even further if those features are cropped out completely. The entire, zeroed out, and cropped scalograms are referred to as the “same” (S)-scalogram, “zeroed out” (Z)-scalogram, and the “valid” (V)-scalogram, respectively. The strategy to validate the hypotheses is to formulate three classification approaches in which the feature vectors are extracted from the (a) S-scalogram in the standard manner, (b) Z-scalogram, and (c) V-scalogram. A subsampling strategy is developed to generate small-sample ERP ensembles to enable customized classifier design for single subjects, and a strategy is developed to select a subset of channels from multiple ERP channels. The three scalogram approaches are implemented using support vector machines, random forests, k-nearest neighbor, multilayer perceptron neural networks, and deep learning convolution neural networks. In order to validate the performance hypotheses, experiments are designed to classify the multi-channel ERPs of five subjects engaged in distinguishing between synonymous and non-synonymous word pairs. The results confirm that the classifiers using the Z-scalogram features outperform those using the S-scalogram features, and the classifiers using the V-scalogram features outperform those using the Z-scalogram features. Most importantly, the relative improvement of the V-scalogram classifiers over the standard S-scalogram classifiers is dramatic. Additionally, enabling the design of customized classifiers for individual subjects is an important contribution to ERP/EEG-based studies and diagnoses of patient-specific disorders.