Dimensionality reduction in evolutionary algorithms-based feature selection for motor imagery brain-computer interface

For the classification of motor imagery brain-computer interface (BCI) based on electroencephalography (EEG), appropriate features are crucial to obtain a high classification accuracy. Considering the characteristics of the EEG signals, the time-frequency-space three-dimensional features are extracted. Due to a considerable number of the extracted features, the performance of a classifier will degrade. Therefore, it is necessary to implement feature selection. However, existing feature selection methods are easy to fall into a local optimum of a high-dimensional feature selection problem. In this paper, a dimensionality reduction mechanism (called DimReM) is proposed, which gradually reduces the dimension of the search space by removing some unimportant features. In principle, DimReM transforms a high-dimensional feature selection problem into a low-dimensional one. DimReM does not introduce any additional parameters and its implementation is simple. To verify its effectiveness, DimReM is combined with different evolutionary algorithms and different classifiers to select features on various kinds of datasets. Compared with evolutionary algorithms without dimensionality reduction, their augmented versions equipped with DimReM can find feature subsets with higher classification accuracies while smaller numbers of selected features.