3.

1 Pre-Processing
After sampling the signals with 250 Hz. A bandpass-filter between 0.5 Hz and
100 Hz was applied to remove the eye movement artifacts which was present in the
dataset. The sensitivity of the amplifier was set to 100 µV. An additional 50 Hz notch
filter was enabled to suppress line noise. These are all options that we choose when
loading the dataset.
3.2 Feature Extraction
The feature extraction process was very challenging to be able to select only the best features of
each signal. The full process is shown in Error! Reference source not found. and the details
will follow.
Calculate estimated parameters For each of the first two modes obtained from the EMD and
each EEG channel, six features were computed: Error! Reference source not found. Root Mean
Square (RMS), Variance, Shannon Entropy, Lempel-Ziv Complexity Value,Central Frequencies.
Maximum Frequencies.

RMS and variance parameters are commonly used in BCI. Entropy was used as a different
metric, as it measure the average amount of information from a measurement. LZ quantifies the
complexity of a signal analyzing its spatio-temporal patterns. The central and maximum
frequencies were used as descriptors of each IMF.
3.3 Classification: Support Vector Machine
SVM is the most appropriate classifier to deal with high dimensional feature vectors Error!
Reference source not found.. There are several kernel functions that could be used with SVM:
Linear, Quadratic, Radial Basis Function (RBF), Polynomial and Multi-layer Preceptron (MLP).
The Guassian or Radial Basis Function (RBF) kernel are the most used in BCI classification
tasks Error! Reference source not found.,. The corresponding SVM is known as Gaussian
SVM or RBF SVM and is calculated as follows:
−‖𝑥−𝑦‖2
𝐾(𝑥, 𝑦) = exp⁡( 2𝜎2 ) (6)
In (6) x and y can be recognized as the squared Euclidean distance between the two feature
vectors. σ is a free parameter.

4. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION

4.1 Data Set
In this work, we used the publically online available BCI competition 2008 dataset [10]. The data
set is consisted of 9 subjects. Each of these subjects has four different motor imagery tasks:
Imagining the movement of the left hand (class 1), right hand (class 2), both feet (class 3), and
tongue (class 4). Each subject recorded two sessions on two different days.
Each of the recorded sessions consists of 6 runs, these runs are separated by short breaks. Each run
consists of 48 trials (12 trials for each of the four different motor imagery tasks classes), this yields
to a total of 288 trials per session. Twenty-two electrodes were used to record the EEG signals; the
montage of these electrodes is shown in Figure 1.
Figure 1. Electrode montage Error! Reference source not found.
There are two major challenges in this data set, first, it is contaminated with eye movement artifacts
which could affect the classification accuracy. Second, the classifiers trained in this dataset are
trained on different days.
As stated in Error! Reference source not found., the subjects were sitting in front of the screen
of the computer in a comfortable armchair. At the beginning of a trial (t=0s), a fixation cross was
shown on the black screen and a short acoustic warning tone was presented. After two seconds
(t=2s), a cue in the form of an arrow pointing either to the left, right, down or up (corresponding
to one of the four classes left hand, right hand, foot or tongue) appeared and stayed on the screen
for 1.25 seconds. These signs prompted the subjects to perform the desired motor imagery task.
The subjects were asked to carry out the motor imagery task until the fixation cross disappeared
from the screen at t=6s and no feedback was provided. A short break followed where the screen
was black again. Figure 2 illustrates the paradigm of this process.
Figure 2. Timing scheme of the paradigm Error! Reference source not found.
4.2 Performance Evaluation: Cohen's kappa
Several measures of performance have been proposed in BCI, such as; accuracy of classification,
Kappa coefficient, mutual information, sensitivity and specificity. The most common is the
accuracy of classification (the percentage of correctly classified feature vectors) and the Kappa
coefficient, in this paper we consider the kappa coefficient.
Cohen's kappa measures the agreement between two raters who each classify N items into C
mutually exclusive categories.
The definition of κ is:
(7)

where po is the relative observed agreement among raters (identical to accuracy), and pe is the
hypothetical probability of chance agreement, using the observed data to calculate the
probabilities of each observer randomly saying each category. If the raters are in complete
agreement then κ = 1. If there is no agreement among the raters other than what would be
expected by chance (as given by pe), κ ≤ 0.
A possible interpretation of Kappa.
- Poor agreement = Less than 0.20
- Fair agreement = 0.20 to 0.40
- Moderate agreement = 0.40 to 0.60
- Good agreement = 0.60 to 0.80
- Very good agreement = 0.80 to 1.00
D’albis et. al. Error! Reference source not found. developed a BCI system that predicts
spelling upon motor imagery brain waves. They classified four classes: left hand, right hand,
both hands and both feet. They applied a feature selection algorithm to select best features.
They classified the features into two types: average features and evolution features. They
classified the signals using linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and obtained a spelling rate of
2-3 character/minute
Lotte et. al. Error! Reference source not found. presented a review on classification
algorithms for EEG based Brain Computer Interfaces. They divided the classification
algorithms into five different categories: linear classifiers, neural networks, nonlinear Bayesian
classifiers, nearest neighbor classifiers and combination of classifiers (Figure 2). They
concluded that SVM is very efficient regardless to the number of classes; this is because of its
immunity to the curse of dimensionality. It is the most appropriate classifier to deal with
feature vectors of high dimensionality.
Medina-Slagdo et. al. Error! Reference source not found. proposed a feature extraction
method for EEG signals for imagining left hand and right hand. They used wavelet transform
to decompose the signal in the spectral bands of interest. The conducted relevance analysis
using fuzzy entropy algorithm to find the most important features in the trainineg set. They
used K-NN and SVM algorithms for classification and obtained an accuracy that reached
98.44%