Hyperdimensional Computing for Noninvasive Brain–Computer Interfaces: Blind and One-Shot Classification of EEG Error-Related Potentials

The mathematical properties of high-dimensional (HD) spaces show remarkable agreement with behaviors controlled by the brain. Computing with HD vectors, referred to as “hypervectors,” is a brain-inspired alternative to computing with numbers. HD computing is characterized by generality, scalability, robustness, and fast learning, making it a prime candidate for utilization in application domains such as brain–computer interfaces. We describe the use of HD computing to classify electroencephalography (EEG) errorrelated potentials for noninvasive brain–computer interfaces. Our algorithm encodes neural activity recorded from 64 EEG electrodes to a single temporal–spatial hypervector. This hypervector represents the event of interest and is used for recognition of the subject’s intentions. Using the full set of training trials, HD computing achieves on average 5% higher accuracy compared to a conventional machine learning method on this task (74.5% vs. 69.5%) and offers further advantages: (1) Our algorithm learns fast by using 34% of training trials while surpassing the conventional method with an average accuracy of 70.5%. (2) Conventional method requires prior domain expert knowledge to carefully select a subset of electrodes for a subsequent preprocessor and classifier, whereas our algorithm blindly uses all 64 electrodes, tolerates noises in data, and the resulting hypervector is intrinsically clustered into HD space; in addition, most preprocessing of the electrode signal can be eliminated while maintaining an average accuracy of 71.7%. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]. CCS Concepts •Computing methodologies → Bio-inspired approaches; •Theory of computation→ Probabilistic computation; Unsupervised learning and clustering;