Application of Covariate Shift Adaptation Techniques in Brain–Computer Interfaces

A phenomenon often found in session-to-session transfers of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) is nonstationarity. It can be caused by fatigue and changing attention level of the user, differing electrode placements, varying impedances, among other reasons. Covariate shift adaptation is an effective method that can adapt to the testing sessions without the need for labeling the testing session data. The method was applied on a BCI Competition III dataset. Results showed that covariate shift adaptation compares favorably with methods used in the BCI competition in coping with nonstationarities. Specifically, bagging combined with covariate shift helped to increase stability, when applied to the competition dataset. An online experiment also proved the effectiveness of bagged-covariate shift method. Thus, it can be summarized that covariate shift adaptation is helpful to realize adaptive BCI systems.