Ensemble Learning Approach for Subject-Independent P300 Speller.

Abstract

P300 speller is a brain-computer interface (BCI) speller system, used for enabling human with different paralyzing disorders, such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), to communicate with the outer world by processing electroencephalography (EEG) signals. Different people have different latency and amplitude of the P300 event-related potential (ERP) component, which is used as the main feature for detecting the target character. In order to achieve robust results for different subjects using generic training (GT), the ensemble learning classifiers are proposed based on linear discriminant analysis (LDA), support vector machine (SVM), k-nearest neighbors (kNN), and convolutional neural network (CNN). The proposed models are trained using data from healthy subjects and tested on both healthy subjects and ALS patients. The results show that the fusion of LDA, kNN and SVM provides the most accurate results, achieving the accuracy of 99% for healthy subjects and about 85% for ALS patients.