Kernel Density Estimation of Electromyographic Signals and Ensemble Learning for Highly Accurate Classification of a Large Set of Hand/Wrist Motions

The performance of myoelectric control highly depends on the features extracted from surface electromyographic (sEMG) signals. We propose three new sEMG features based on the kernel density estimation. The trimmed mean of density (TMD), the entropy of density, and the trimmed mean absolute value of derivative density were computed for each sEMG channel. These features were tested for the classification of single tasks as well as of two tasks concurrently performed. For single tasks, correlation-based feature selection was used, and the features were then classified using linear discriminant analysis (LDA), non-linear support vector machines, and multi-layer perceptron. The eXtreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) classifier was used for the classification of two movements simultaneously performed. The second and third versions of the Ninapro dataset (conventional control) and Ameri’s movement dataset (simultaneous control) were used to test the proposed features. For the Ninapro dataset, the overall accuracy of LDA using the TMD feature was 98.99 ± 1.36% and 92.25 ± 9.48% for able-bodied and amputee subjects, respectively. Using ensemble learning of the three classifiers, the average macro and micro-F-score, macro recall, and precision on the validation sets were 98.23 ± 2.02, 98.32 ± 1.93, 98.32 ± 1.93, and 98.88 ± 1.31%, respectively, for the intact subjects. The movement misclassification percentage was 1.75 ± 1.73 and 3.44 ± 2.23 for the intact subjects and amputees. The proposed features were significantly correlated with the movement classes [Generalized Linear Model (GLM); P-value < 0.05]. An accurate online implementation of the proposed algorithm was also presented. For the simultaneous control, the overall accuracy was 99.71 ± 0.08 and 97.85 ± 0.10 for the XGBoost and LDA classifiers, respectively. The proposed features are thus promising for conventional and simultaneous myoelectric control.