TY - JOUR A1 - Dornhege, Guido A1 - Blankertz, Benjamin A1 - Curio, Gabriel A1 - Müller, Klaus-Robert T1 - Boosting bit rates in noninvasive EEG single-trial classifications by feature combination and multiclass paradigms N2 - Noninvasive electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings provide for easy and safe access to human neocortical processes which can be exploited for a brain-computer interface (BCI). At present, however, the use of BCIs is severely limited by low bit-transfer rates. We systematically analyze and develop two recent concepts, both capable of enhancing the information gain from multichannel scalp EEG recordings: 1) the combination of classifiers, each specifically tailored for different physiological phenomena, e.g., slow cortical potential shifts, such as the premovement Bereitschaftspotential or differences in spatio-spectral distributions of brain activity (i.e., focal event-related desynchronizations) and 2) behavioral paradigms inducing the subjects to generate one out of several brain states (multiclass approach) which all bare a distinctive spatio-temporal signature well discriminable in the standard scalp EEG. We derive information-theoretic predictions and demonstrate their relevance in experimental data. We will show that a suitably arranged interaction between these concepts can significantly boost BCI performances Y1 - 2004 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Blankertz, Benjamin A1 - Müller, Klaus-Robert A1 - Curio, Gabriel A1 - Vaughan, Theresa M. A1 - Schalk, Gerwin A1 - Wolpaw, Jonathan R. A1 - Schlogl, Alois A1 - Neuper, Christa A1 - Pfurtscheller, Gert A1 - Hinterberger, Thilo A1 - Schroder, Michael A1 - Birbaumer, Niels T1 - The BCI competition 2003 : Progress and perspectives in detection and discrimination of EEG single trials N2 - Interest in developing a new method of man-to-machine communication-a brain-computer interface (BCI)-has grown steadily over the past few decades. BCIs create a new communication channel between the brain and an output device by bypassing conventional motor output pathways of nerves and muscles. These systems use signals recorded from the scalp, the surface of the cortex, or from inside the brain to enable users to control a variety of applications including simple word-processing software and orthotics. BCI technology could therefore provide a new communication and control option for individuals who cannot otherwise express their wishes to the outside world. Signal processing and classification methods are essential tools in the development of improved BCI technology. We organized the BCI Competition 2003 to evaluate the current state of the art of these tools. Four laboratories well versed in EEG-based BCI research provided six data sets in a documented format. We made these data sets (i.e., labeled training sets and unlabeled test sets) and their descriptions available on the Internet. The goal in the competition was to maximize the performance measure for the test labels. Researchers worldwide tested their algorithms and competed for the best classification results. This paper describes the six data sets and the results and function of the most successful algorithms Y1 - 2004 SN - 0018-9294 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Harmeling, Stefan A1 - Meinecke, Frank C. A1 - Müller, Klaus-Robert T1 - Injecting noise for analysing the stability of ICA components N2 - Usually, noise is considered to be destructive. We present a new method that constructively injects noise to assess the reliability and the grouping structure of empirical ICA component estimates. Our method can be viewed as a Monte-Carlo-style approximation of the curvature of some performance measure at the solution. Simulations show that the true root-mean-squared angle distances between the real sources and the source estimates can be approximated well by our method. In a toy experiment, we see that we are also able to reveal the underlying grouping structure of the extracted ICA components. Furthermore, an experiment with fetal ECG data demonstrates that our approach is useful for exploratory data analysis of real-world data. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved Y1 - 2004 SN - 0165-1684 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Müller, Klaus-Robert A1 - Vigario, R. A1 - Meinecke, Frank C. A1 - Ziehe, Andreas T1 - Blind source separation techniques for decomposing event-related brain signals N2 - Recently blind source separation (BSS) methods have been highly successful when applied to biomedical data. This paper reviews the concept of BSS and demonstrates its usefulness in the context of event-related MEG measurements. In a first experiment we apply BSS to artifact identification of raw MEG data and discuss how the quality of the resulting independent component projections can be evaluated. The second part of our study considers averaged data of event-related magnetic fields. Here, it is particularly important to monitor and thus avoid possible overfitting due to limited sample size. A stability assessment of the BSS decomposition allows to solve this task and an additional grouping of the BSS components reveals interesting structure, that could ultimately be used for gaining a better physiological modeling of the data Y1 - 2004 SN - 0218-1274 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Sugiyama, Masashi A1 - Kawanabe, Motoaki A1 - Müller, Klaus-Robert T1 - Trading variance reduction with unbiasedness : the regularized subspace information criterion for robust model selection in kernel regression N2 - A well-known result by Stein (1956) shows that in particular situations, biased estimators can yield better parameter estimates than their generally preferred unbiased counterparts. This letter follows the same spirit, as we will stabilize the unbiased generalization error estimates by regularization and finally obtain more robust model selection criteria for learning. We trade a small bias against a larger variance reduction, which has the beneficial effect of being more precise on a single training set. We focus on the subspace information criterion (SIC), which is an unbiased estimator of the expected generalization error measured by the reproducing kernel Hilbert space norm. SIC can be applied to the kernel regression, and it was shown in earlier experiments that a small regularization of SIC has a stabilization effect. However, it remained open how to appropriately determine the degree of regularization in SIC. In this article, we derive an unbiased estimator of the expected squared error, between SIC and the expected generalization error and propose determining the degree of regularization of SIC such that the estimator of the expected squared error is minimized. Computer simulations with artificial and real data sets illustrate that the proposed method works effectively for improving the precision of SIC, especially in the high-noise-level cases. We furthermore compare the proposed method to the original SIC, the cross-validation, and an empirical Bayesian method in ridge parameter selection, with good results Y1 - 2004 SN - 0899-7667 ER -