Classification of non-time-locked rapid serial visual presentation events for brain-computer interaction using deep learning

Deep learning solutions based on deep neural networks (DNN) and deep stack networks (DSN) were investigated for classifying target images in a non-time-locked rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) image target identification task using EEG. Several feature extraction methods associated with this task were implemented and tested for deep learning, where a sliding window method using the trained classifier was used to predict the occurrence of target events in a non-time-locked fashion.. The deep learning algorithms explored based on deep stacking networks were able to improve the error rate by about 5% over existing algorithms such as linear discriminant analysis (LDA) for this task. Initial test results also showed that this method based on deep stacking networks for non-time-locked classification can produce an error rate close to that achieved for time-locked classification, thus illustrating the power of deep learning for complex feature spaces.