Composite Common Spatial Pattern for Subject-to-Subject Transfer

Common spatial pattern (CSP) is a popular feature extraction method for electroencephalogram ( EEG) classification. Most of existing CSP-based methods exploit covariance matrices on a subject-by-subject basis so that inter-subject information is neglected. In this paper we present modifications of CSP for subject-to-subject transfer, where we exploit a linear combination of covariance matrices of subjects in consideration. We develop two methods to determine a composite covariance matrix that is a weighted sum of covariance matrices involving subjects, leading to composite CSP. Numerical experiments on dataset IVa in BCI competition III confirm that our composite CSP methods improve classification performance over the standard CSP (on a subject-by-subject basis), especially in the case of subjects with fewer number of training samples.