A novel objective function minimization for sparse spatial filters

Common spatial pattern (CSP) method is widely used in brain machine interface (BMI) applications to extract features from the multichannel neural activity through a set of spatial projections. The CSP method easily overfits the data when the number of training trials is not sufficiently large and it is sensitive to daily variation of multichannel electrode placement, which limits its applicability for everyday use in BMI systems. To overcome these problems, the amount of channels that is used in projections, should be limited. We introduce a spatially sparse projection (SSP) method that exploits the unconstrained minimization of a new objective function with approximated ℓ₁ penalty. The SSP method is employed to classify the two class EEG data set. Our method outperforms the standard CSP method and provides comparable results to ℓ₀ norm based solution and it is associated with less computational complexity.