EEG feature selection method based on maximum information coefficient and quantum particle swarm

Abstract To reduce the dimensionality of EEG features and improve classification accuracy, we propose an improved hybrid feature selection method for EEG feature selection. First, MIC is used to remove irrelevant features and redundant features to reduce the search space of the second stage. QPSO is then used to optimize the feature in the second stage to obtain the optimal feature subset. Considering that both dimensionality and classification accuracy affect the performance of feature subsets, we design a new fitness function. Moreover, we optimize the parameters of the classifier while optimizing the feature subset to improve the classification accuracy and reduce the running time of the algorithm. Finally, experiments were performed on EEG and UCI datasets and compared with five existing feature selection methods. The results show that the feature subsets obtained by the proposed method have low dimensionality, high classification accuracy, and low computational complexity, which validates the effectiveness of the proposed method.