Modeling the variability of EEG/MEG data through statistical machine learning

• Main Author: Zaremba, Wojciech
• Language: ENG
• Published: Ecole Polytechnique X 2012
• Subjects: [INFO:INFO_CV] Computer Science/Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition; MEG; EEG; brain decoding; mind reading; latent SVM; LSVM; spectral method; laplacian regularization; kernel SVM; event related potential; P300; BMI; NP-hardness of LSVM
• Online Access: http://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/tel-00803958; http://tel.archives-ouvertes.fr/docs/00/80/39/58/PDF/mgr.pdf

Brain neural activity generates electrical discharges, which manifest as electrical and magnetic potentials around the scalp. Those potentials can be registered with magnetoencephalography (MEG) and electroencephalography (EEG) devices. Data acquired by M/EEG is extremely difficult to work with due to the inherent complexity of underlying brain processes and low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Machine learning techniques have to be employed in order to reveal the underlying structure of the signal and to understand the brain state. This thesis explores a diverse range of machine learning techniques which model the structure of M/EEG data in order to decode the mental state. It focuses on measuring a subject's variability and on modeling intrasubject variability. We propose to measure subject variability with a spectral clustering setup. Further, we extend this approach to a unified classification framework based on Laplacian regularized support vector machine (SVM). We solve the issue of intrasubject variability by employing a model with latent variables (based on a latent SVM). Latent variables describe transformations that map samples into a comparable state. We focus mainly on intrasubject experiments to model temporal misalignment.