Domain generalization through latent distribution exploration for motor imagery EEG classification

Electroencephalography (EEG)-based Motor Imagery (MI) brain-computer interface (BCI) systems play essential roles in motor function rehabilitation for patients with post-stroke. Existing neural networks for decoding MI EEG face challenges due to nonstationary characteristics and subject-specific variations of EEG data. To address these challenges and improve generalization performance, this study proposes a domain generalization (DG) model that eliminates the need for user-specific calibration in real-life applications. Specifically, the proposed model comprises two branches: the first branch applies several independent decision-making networks to decode and classify subjects’ motor intentions, while the second branch adaptively assigns weights to classification results and fuses them into a comprehensive decision. Both branches utilize EEGNet and ShallowConvNet to extract time-frequency-spatial features. By implementing multiple classification networks, the model can learn a broad range of data distributions from source subjects, which contributes to improved generalization performance on target subjects. The proposed EEG-DG framework was evaluated on BCI Competition IV Dataset 2a, 2b and PhysioNet. Results show that the proposed framework significantly enhances the classification performance of MI EEG, outperforming several state-of-the-art models on all three datasets, underlining its superior efficacy in real-world scenarios and exceptional generalization performance. The source code can be accessed at https://github.com/DrugLover/Multibranch-DG-EEG.