Online and Offline Domain Adaptation for Reducing BCI Calibration Effort

Many real-world brain-computer interface (BCI) applications rely on single-trial classification of event-related potentials (ERPs) in EEG signals. However, because different subjects have different neural responses to even the same stimulus, it is very difficult to build a generic ERP classifier whose parameters fit all subjects. The classifier needs to be calibrated for each individual subject, using some labeled subject-specific data. This paper proposes both online and offline weighted adaptation regularization (wAR) algorithms to reduce this calibration effort, i.e., to minimize the amount of labeled subject-specific EEG data required in BCI calibration, and hence to increase the utility of the BCI system. We demonstrate using a visually-evoked potential oddball task and three different EEG headsets that both online and offline wAR algorithms significantly outperform several other algorithms. Moreover, through source domain selection, we can reduce their computational cost by about 50%, making them more suitable for real-time applications.