Fast and Efficient Four‑class Motor Imagery Electroencephalography Signal Analysis Using Common Spatial Pattern–Ridge Regression Algorithm for the Purpose of Brain–Computer Interface

Brain–computer interfaces enable users to control devices with electroencephalographic (EEG) activity from the scalp or with single-neuron activity from within the brain. One of the most challenging issues in this regard is the balance between the accuracy of brain signals from patients and the speed of interpreting them into machine language. The main objective of this paper is to analyze different approaches to achieve the balance more quickly and in a better way. To reduce the ocular artifacts, the symmetric prewhitening independent component analysis (ICA) algorithm has been evaluated, which has the lowest runtime and lowest signal-to-interference (SIR) index, without destroying the original signal. After quick elimination of all undesirable signals, two successful feature extractors – the log-band power algorithm and common spatial patterns (CSPs) – are used to extract features. The emphasis is on identifying discriminative properties of the feature sets representing EEG trials recorded during the imagination of the tongue, feet, and left–right-hand movement. Finally, three well-known classifiers are evaluated, where the ridge regression classifier and CSPs as feature extractor have the highest accuracy classification rate about 83.06% with a standard deviation of 1.22%, counterposing the recent studies.