Cross-correlation aided support vector machine classifier for classification of EEG signals

Over the last few decades pattern classification has been one of the most challenging area of research. In the present-age pattern classification problems, the support vector machines (SVMs) have been extensively adopted as machine learning tools. SVM achieves higher generalization performance, as it utilizes an induction principle called structural risk minimization (SRM) principle. The SRM principle seeks to minimize the upper bound of the generalization error consisting of the sum of the training error and a confidence interval. SVMs are basically designed for binary classification problems and employs supervised learning to find the optimal separating hyperplane between the two classes of data. The main objective of this paper is to introduce a most promising pattern recognition technique called cross-correlation aided SVM based classifier. The idea of using cross-correlation for feature extraction is relatively new in the domain of pattern recognition. In this paper, the proposed technique has been utilized for binary classification of EEG signals. The binary classifiers employ suitable features extracted from crosscorrelograms of EEG signals. These cross-correlation aided SVM classifiers have been employed for some benchmark EEG signals and the proposed method could achieve classification accuracy as high as 95.96% compared to a recently proposed method where the reported accuracy was 94.5%.