Domain-generalized EEG classification with category-oriented feature decorrelation and cross-view consistency learning

Abstract

Generalizing the electroencephalogram (EEG) decoding methods to unseen subjects is an important research direction for realizing practical application of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). Since distribution shifts across subjects, the performance of most current deep neural networks for decoding EEG signals degrades when dealing with unseen subjects. Domain generalization (DG) aims to tackle this issue by learning invariant representations across subjects. To this end, we propose a novel domain-generalized EEG classification framework, named FDCL, to generalize EEG decoding through category-relevant and -irrelevant Feature Decorrelation and Cross-view invariant feature Learning. Specifically, we first devise data augmented regularization through mixing the segments of same-category features from multiple subjects, which increases the diversity of EEG data by spanning the space of subjects. Furthermore, we introduce feature decorrelation regularization to learn the weights of the augmented EEG trials to remove the dependencies between their features, so that the true mapping relationship between relevant features and corresponding labels can be better established. To further distill subject-invariant EEG feature representations, cross-view consistency learning regularization is introduced to encourage consistent predictions of category-relevant features induced from different augmented EEG views. We seamlessly integrate three complementary regularizations into a unified DG framework to jointly improve the generalizability and robustness of the model on unseen subjects. Experimental results on motor imagery (MI) based EEG datasets validate that the proposed FDCL outperforms the available state-of-the-art methods.