Empirical Mode Decomposition Algorithms for Classification of Single-Channel EEG Manifesting McGurk Effect

Brain state classification using electroencephalography (EEG) finds applications in both clinical and non-clinical contexts, such as detecting sleep states or perceiving illusory effects during multisensory McGurk paradigm, respectively. Existing literature mostly considers recordings of EEG electrodes that cover the entire head. However, for real world applications, wearable devices that encompass just one (or a few) channels are desirable, which make the classification of EEG states even more challenging. With this as background, we applied variants of data driven Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) on McGurk EEG, which is an illusory perception of speech when the movement of lips does not match with the audio signal, for classifying whether the perception is affected by the visual cue or not. After applying a common pre-processing pipeline, we explored four EMD based frameworks to extract EEG features, which were classified using Random Forest. Among the four alternatives, the most effective framework decomposes the ensemble average of two classes of EEG into their respective intrinsic mode functions forming the basis on which the trials were projected to obtain features, which on classification resulted in accuracies of 63.66% using single electrode and 75.85% using three electrodes. The frequency band which plays vital role during audio-visual integration was also studied using traditional band pass filters. Of all, Gamma band was found to be the most prominent followed by alpha and beta bands which contemplates findings from previous studies.