Test–retest reliability and feature selection in physiological time series classification

Feature test–retest reliability is proposed as a useful criterion for the selection/exclusion of features in time series classification tasks. Three sets of physiological time series are examined, EEG and ECG recordings together with measurements of neck movement. Comparisons of reliability estimates from test–retest studies with measures of feature importance from classification tasks suggest that low reliability can be used to exclude irrelevant features prior to classifier training. By removing features with low reliability an unnecessary degradation of the classifier accuracy may be avoided.