Using ELM-based weighted probabilistic model in the classification of synchronous EEG BCI

Extreme learning machine (ELM) is an effective machine learning technique with simple theory and fast implementation, which has gained increasing interest from various research fields recently. A new method that combines ELM with probabilistic model method is proposed in this paper to classify the electroencephalography (EEG) signals in synchronous brain–computer interface (BCI) system. In the proposed method, the softmax function is used to convert the ELM output to classification probability. The Chernoff error bound, deduced from the Bayesian probabilistic model in the training process, is adopted as the weight to take the discriminant process. Since the proposed method makes use of the knowledge from all preceding training datasets, its discriminating performance improves accumulatively. In the test experiments based on the datasets from BCI competitions, the proposed method is compared with other classification methods, including the linear discriminant analysis, support vector machine, ELM and weighted probabilistic model methods. For comparison, the mutual information, classification accuracy and information transfer rate are considered as the evaluation indicators for these classifiers. The results demonstrate that our method shows competitive performance against other methods.