Classification of Right/Left Hand Motor Imagery by Effective Connectivity Based on Transfer Entropy in Electroencephalogram Signal

INTRODUCTION: The right and left-hand motor imagery (MI) analysis based on the electroencephalogram (EEG) signal can directly link the central nervous system to a computer or a device.

This study aims to identify a set of robust and nonlinear effective brain connectivity features quantified by transfer entropy (TE) to characterize the relationship between brain regions from EEG signals and create a hierarchical feature selection and classification for discrimination of right and lefthand MI tasks.

METHODS: TE is calculated among EEG channels as the distinctive, effective connectivity features.

TE is a model-free method that can measure nonlinear effective connectivity and analyze multivariate dependent directed information flow among neural EEG channels.

Then four feature subset selection methods namely relief-F, Fisher, Laplacian, and local learningbased clustering (LLCFS) algorithms are used to choose the most significant effective connectivity features and reduce redundant information.

Finally, support vector machine (SVM) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA) methods are used for classification.

RESULTS: Results show that the best performance in 29 healthy subjects and 60 trials is achieved using the TE method via the Relief-F algorithm as feature selection and support vector machine (SVM) classification with 91.02% accuracy.

CONCLUSION: The TE index and a hierarchical feature selection and classification can be useful for the discrimination of right- and left-hand MI tasks from multichannel EEG signals.

HIGHLIGHTS: Effective connectivity features were extracted from electroencephalogram (EEG) to analyze relationships between regions.

Four feature selection methods used to select most significant effective features.

Support vector machine (SVM) used for discrimination of right and left hand motor imagery (MI) task.

PLAIN LANGUAGE SUMMARY: In this study, we investigated brain activity using effective connectivity during MI task based on EEG signals.

The motor imagery task can accomplish the same goal as motor execution, since they are both activated by the same brain area.

Transfer entropy, coherence, and Granger casualty were employed to extract the features.

Differential patterns of activity between the left vs. right MI task showed activity around the motor area rather than other areas.

In order to reduce redundant information and select the most significant effective connectivity features, four feature subset selection algorithms are used: Relief-F, Fisher, Laplacian, and learning-based clustering feature selection (LLCFS).

Then, support vector machine (SVM) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA) are used to classify left and right hand MI task.

Comparison of three different connectivity methods showed that TE index had the highest classification accuracy, and could be useful for the discrimination of right and left hand MI tasks from multichannel EEG signals.