Channel and Feature Selection for a Motor Imagery-Based BCI System Using Multilevel Particle Swarm Optimization

Brain-computer interface (BCI) is a communication and control system linking the human brain and computers or other electronic devices. However, irrelevant channels and misleading features unrelated to tasks limit classification performance. To address these problems, we propose an efficient signal processing framework based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) for channel and feature selection, channel selection, and feature selection. Modified Stockwell transforms were used for a feature extraction, and multilevel hybrid PSO-Bayesian linear discriminant analysis was applied to optimization and classification. The BCI Competition III dataset I was used here to confirm the superiority of the proposed scheme. Compared to a method without optimization (89% accuracy), the best classification accuracy of the PSO-based scheme was 99% when less than 10.5% of the original features were used, the test time was reduced by more than 90%, and it achieved Kappa values and F-score of 0.98 and 98.99%, respectively, and better signal-to-noise ratio, thereby outperforming existing algorithms. The results show that the channel and feature selection scheme can accelerate the speed of convergence to the global optimum and reduce the training time. As the proposed framework can significantly improve classification performance, effectively reduce the number of features, and greatly shorten the test time, it can serve as a reference for related real-time BCI application system research.