Stabilizing Subject Transfer in EEG Classification with Divergence Estimation

Classification models for electroencephalogram (EEG) data show a large decrease in performance when evaluated on unseen test sub jects. We reduce this performance decrease using new regularization techniques during model training. We propose several graphical models to describe an EEG classification task. From each model, we identify statistical relationships that should hold true in an idealized training scenario (with infinite data and a globally-optimal model) but that may not hold in practice. We design regularization penalties to enforce these relationships in two stages. First, we identify suitable proxy quantities (divergences such as Mutual Information and Wasserstein-1) that can be used to measure statistical independence and dependence relationships. Second, we provide algorithms to efficiently estimate these quantities during training using secondary neural network models. We conduct extensive computational experiments using a large benchmark EEG dataset, comparing our proposed techniques with a baseline method that uses an adversarial classifier. We find our proposed methods significantly increase balanced accuracy on test subjects and decrease overfitting. The proposed methods exhibit a larger benefit over a greater range of hyperparameters than the baseline method, with only a small computational cost at training time. These benefits are largest when used for a fixed training period, though there is still a significant benefit for a subset of hyperparameters when our techniques are used in conjunction with early stopping regularization.