A generative model approach for decoding in the visual event-related potential-based brain-computer interface speller

There is a strong tendency towards discriminative approaches in brain-computer interface (BCI) research. We argue that generative model-based approaches are worth pursuing and propose a simple generative model for the visual ERP-based BCI speller which incorporates prior knowledge about the brain signals. We show that the proposed generative method needs less training data to reach a given letter prediction performance than the state of the art discriminative approaches.