PlugSelect: Pruning Channels With Plug-and-Play Flexibility for Electroencephalography-Based Brain–Computer Interface
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Automatic minimization and optimization of the number of electrodes are crucial for the practical application of electroencephalography (EEG)-based brain-computer interface (BCI). Previous methods typically require additional training costs or rely on prior knowledge assumptions. This study proposes a novel channel pruning model, PlugSelect, applicable across a broad range of BCI paradigms with no additional training costs and offering plug-and-play functionality. It integrates gradients along the input path to globally infer the causal relationships between input channels and outputs, and ranks the contributions to identify the most highly attributed channels. The results showed that for three BCI paradigms,i.e., auditory attention decoding (AAD), motor imagery (MI), and affective computation (AC), PlugSelect could reduce the number of channels by at least half while effectively maintaining decoding performance and improving efficiency. The results benefit the design of wearable EEG-based devices, facilitating the practical application of BCI technology.
Authors: Xue Yuan, Keren Shi, Ning Jiang, Jiayuan He
Institutions: Sichuan University, West China Hospital of Sichuan University
Language: English
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4412722398