Can EEG resting state data benefit data-driven approaches for motor-imagery decoding?
This work addresses the problem of enhancing motor-imagery BCI performance for users, but it is incremental as it shows minimal gains and highlights issues with generalization.
The study investigated whether integrating resting-state EEG data with motor-imagery data could improve decoding models for brain-computer interfaces, finding limited benefits with only a mean accuracy improvement in within-user scenarios on two datasets.
Resting-state EEG data in neuroscience research serve as reliable markers for user identification and reveal individual-specific traits. Despite this, the use of resting-state data in EEG classification models is limited. In this work, we propose a feature concatenation approach to enhance decoding models' generalization by integrating resting-state EEG, aiming to improve motor imagery BCI performance and develop a user-generalized model. Using feature concatenation, we combine the EEGNet model, a standard convolutional neural network for EEG signal classification, with functional connectivity measures derived from resting-state EEG data. The findings suggest that although grounded in neuroscience with data-driven learning, the concatenation approach has limited benefits for generalizing models in within-user and across-user scenarios. While an improvement in mean accuracy for within-user scenarios is observed on two datasets, concatenation doesn't benefit across-user scenarios when compared with random data concatenation. The findings indicate the necessity of further investigation on the model interpretability and the effect of random data concatenation on model robustness.