This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the modern classification algorithms used in EEG-based BCIs, presents the principles of these methods and guidelines on when and how to use them. It also identifies a number of challenges to further advance EEG classification in BCI.

Domain adaptation is one of the most challenging tasks of modern data analytics. If the adaptation is done correctly, models built on a specific data representation become more robust when confronted to data depicting the same classes, but described by another observation system. Among the many strategies proposed, finding domain-invariant representations has shown excellent properties, in particular since it allows to train a unique classifier effective in all domains. In this paper, we propose a regularized unsupervised optimal transportation model to perform the alignment of the representations in the source and target domains. We learn a transportation plan matching both PDFs, which constrains labeled samples of the same class in the source domain to remain close during transport. This way, we exploit at the same time the labeled samples in the source and the distributions observed in both domains. Experiments on toy and challenging real visual adaptation examples show the interest of the method, that consistently outperforms state of the art approaches. In addition, numerical experiments show that our approach leads to better performances on domain invariant deep learning features and can be easily adapted to the semi-supervised case where few labeled samples are available in the target domain.

An efficient and general multiple kernel learning (MKL) algorithm has been recently proposed by Sonnenburg et al. (2006). This approach has opened new perspectives since it makes the MKL approach tractable for largescale problems, by iteratively using existing support vector machine code. However, it turns out that this iterative algorithm needs several iterations before converging towards a reasonable solution. In this paper, we address the MKL problem through an adaptive 2-norm regularization formulation. Weights on each kernel matrix are included in the standard SVM empirical risk minimization problem with a ℓ 1 constraint to encourage sparsity. We propose an algorithm for solving this problem and provide an new insight on MKL algorithms based on block 1-norm regularization by showing that the two approaches are equivalent. Experimental results show that the resulting algorithm converges rapidly and its efficiency compares favorably to other MKL algorithms.

Brain-computer interface P300 speller aims at helping patients unable to activate muscles to spell words by means of their brain signal activities. Associated to this BCI paradigm, there is the problem of classifying electroencephalogram signals related to responses to some visual stimuli. This paper addresses the problem of signal responses variability within a single subject in such brain-computer interface. We propose a method that copes with such variabilities through an ensemble of classifiers approach. Each classifier is composed of a linear support vector machine trained on a small part of the available data and for which a channel selection procedure has been performed. Performances of our algorithm have been evaluated on dataset II of the BCI Competition III and has yielded the best performance of the competition.