Jordi Solé-Casals

K. López-de-Ipiña, Marcos Faundez-Zanuy, Jordi Solé-Casals et al.

Most of medical developments require the ability to identify samples that are anomalous with respect to a target group or control group, in the sense they could belong to a new, previously unseen class or are not class data. In this case when there are not enough data to train two-class One-class classification appear like an available solution. On the other hand non-linear approaches could give very useful information. The aim of our project is to contribute to earlier diagnosis of AD and better estimates of its severity by using automatic analysis performed through new biomarkers extracted from speech signal. The methods selected in this case are speech biomarkers oriented to Spontaneous Speech and Emotional Response Analysis. In this approach One-class classifiers and two-class classifiers are analyzed. The use of information about outlier and Fractal Dimension features improves the system performance.

Hao Jia, Zhe Sun, Feng Duan et al.

In non-invasive brain-computer interface systems, pre-movement decoding plays an important role in the detection of movement before limbs actually move. Movement-related cortical potential is a kind of brain activity associated with pre-movement decoding. In current studies, patterns decoded from movement are mainly applied to the binary classification between movement state and resting state, such as elbow flexion and rest. The classifications between two movement states and among multiple movement states are still challenging. This study proposes a new method, the star-arrangement spectral filtering (SASF), to solve the multi-class pre-movement classification problem. We first design a referenced task-related component analysis (RTRCA) framework that consists of two modules. This first module is the classification between movement state and resting state; the second module is the classification of multiple movement states. SASF is developed by optimizing the features in RTRCA. In SASF, feature selection on filter banks is used on the first module of RTRCA, and feature selection on time windows is used on the second module of RTRCA. A linear discriminant analysis classifier is used to classify the optimized features. In the binary classification between two motions, the classification accuracy of SASF achieves 0.9670$\pm$0.0522, which is significantly higher than the result provided by the deep convolutional neural network (0.6247$\pm$0.0680) and the discriminative spatial pattern method (0.4400$\pm$0.0700). In the multi-class classification of 7 states, the classification accuracy of SASF is 0.9491$\pm$0.0372. The proposed SASF greatly improves the classification between two motions and enables the classification among multiple motions. The result shows that the movement can be decoded from EEG signals before the actual limb movement.

Hao Jia, Zhe Sun, Feng Duan et al.

Pre-movement decoding plays an important role in movement detection and is able to detect movement onset with low-frequency electroencephalogram (EEG) signals before the limb moves. In related studies, pre-movement decoding with standard task-related component analysis (STRCA) has been demonstrated to be efficient for classification between movement state and resting state. However, the accuracies of STRCA differ among subbands in the frequency domain. Due to individual differences, the best subband differs among subjects and is difficult to be determined. This study aims to improve the performance of the STRCA method by a feature selection on multiple subbands and avoid the selection of best subbands. This study first compares three frequency range settings ($M_1$: subbands with equally spaced bandwidths; $M_2$: subbands whose high cut-off frequencies are twice the low cut-off frequencies; $M_3$: subbands that start at some specific fixed frequencies and end at the frequencies in an arithmetic sequence.). Then, we develop a mutual information based technique to select the features in these subbands. A binary support vector machine classifier is used to classify the selected essential features. The results show that $M_3$ is a better setting than the other two settings. With the filter banks in $M_3$, the classification accuracy of the proposed FBTRCA achieves 0.8700$\pm$0.1022, which means a significantly improved performance compared to STRCA (0.8287$\pm$0.1101) as well as to the cross validation and testing method (0.8431$\pm$0.1078).

Aurora Saibene, Francesca Gasparini, Jordi Solé-Casals

The ageing process may lead to cognitive and physical impairments, which may affect elderly everyday life. In recent years, the use of Brain Computer Interfaces (BCIs) based on Electroencephalography (EEG) has revealed to be particularly effective to promote and enhance rehabilitation procedures, especially by exploiting motor imagery experimental paradigms. Moreover, BCIs seem to increase patients' engagement and have proved to be reliable tools for elderly overall wellness improvement. However, EEG signals usually present a low signal-to-noise ratio and can be recorded for a limited time. Thus, irrelevant information and faulty samples could affect the BCI performance. Introducing a methodology that allows the extraction of informative components from the EEG signal while maintaining its intrinsic characteristics, may provide a solution to both the described issues: noisy data may be avoided by having only relevant components and combining relevant components may represent a good strategy to substitute the data without requiring long or repeated EEG recordings. Moreover, substituting faulty trials may significantly improve the classification performances of a BCI when translating imagined movement to rehabilitation systems. To this end, in this work the EEG signal decomposition by means of multivariate empirical mode decomposition is proposed to obtain its oscillatory modes, called Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMFs). Subsequently, a novel procedure for relevant IMF selection criterion based on the IMF time-frequency representation and entropy is provided. After having verified the reliability of the EEG signal reconstruction with the relevant IMFs only, the relevant IMFs are combined to produce new artificial data and provide new samples to use for BCI training.

Jin Zhang, Fan Feng, Pere Marti-Puig et al.

Empirical mode decomposition (EMD) has developed into a prominent tool for adaptive, scale-based signal analysis in various fields like robotics, security and biomedical engineering. Since the dramatic increase in amount of data puts forward higher requirements for the capability of real-time signal analysis, it is difficult for existing EMD and its variants to trade off the growth of data dimension and the speed of signal analysis. In order to decompose multi-dimensional signals at a faster speed, we present a novel signal-serialization method (serial-EMD), which concatenates multi-variate or multi-dimensional signals into a one-dimensional signal and uses various one-dimensional EMD algorithms to decompose it. To verify the effects of the proposed method, synthetic multi-variate time series, artificial 2D images with various textures and real-world facial images are tested. Compared with existing multi-EMD algorithms, the decomposition time becomes significantly reduced. In addition, the results of facial recognition with Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMFs) extracted using our method can achieve a higher accuracy than those obtained by existing multi-EMD algorithms, which demonstrates the superior performance of our method in terms of the quality of IMFs. Furthermore, this method can provide a new perspective to optimize the existing EMD algorithms, that is, transforming the structure of the input signal rather than being constrained by developing envelope computation techniques or signal decomposition methods. In summary, the study suggests that the serial-EMD technique is a highly competitive and fast alternative for multi-dimensional signal analysis.

Cesar F. Caiafa, Ziyao Wang, Jordi Solé-Casals et al.

In this paper, the problem of training a classifier on a dataset with incomplete features is addressed. We assume that different subsets of features (random or structured) are available at each data instance. This situation typically occurs in the applications when not all the features are collected for every data sample. A new supervised learning method is developed to train a general classifier, such as a logistic regression or a deep neural network, using only a subset of features per sample, while assuming sparse representations of data vectors on an unknown dictionary. Sufficient conditions are identified, such that, if it is possible to train a classifier on incomplete observations so that their reconstructions are well separated by a hyperplane, then the same classifier also correctly separates the original (unobserved) data samples. Extensive simulation results on synthetic and well-known datasets are presented that validate our theoretical findings and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method compared to traditional data imputation approaches and one state-of-the-art algorithm.