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A genetic programming approach to the evolution of brain–computer interfaces for 2-D mouse–pointer control

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Abstract

We propose the use of genetic programming (GP) as a means to evolve brain–computer interfaces for mouse control. Our objective is to synthesise complete systems, which analyse electrical brain signals and directly transform them into pointer movements, almost from scratch, the only input provided by us in the process being the set of visual stimuli to be used to generate recognisable brain activity. Experimental results with our GP approach are very promising and compare favourably with those produced by support vector machines.

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Notes

  1. Some of this work has appeared in a much shorter paper published in proceedings of EuroGP 2011 [24].

  2. While focusing attention on the target stimulus is a requirement, the amplitude of the P300 is significantly enhanced if, additionally, a task is assigned to the occurrence of such a stimulus [25] as long as task demands are still within a subject’s capabilities. In previous experiments we found that naming target colours produced the strongest P300s.

  3. As in [17] the SVM classifier was implemented as an ensemble of 6 linear SVMs, with each SVM trained on a subset of the collected data across all the channels. All channels were used to train the SVMs since it has been shown that channel selection, when used in conjunction with SVMs, only marginally improves results [26].

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Acknowledgments

We would like to thank EPSRC (grant EP/F033818/1) for financial support. We would also like to thank the reviewers for their very useful comments.

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  1. School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering, University of Essex, Colchester, CO4 3SQ, UK

    Riccardo Poli, Mathew Salvaris & Caterina Cinel

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  1. Riccardo Poli
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  2. Mathew Salvaris
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  3. Caterina Cinel
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Correspondence to Riccardo Poli.

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Poli, R., Salvaris, M. & Cinel, C. A genetic programming approach to the evolution of brain–computer interfaces for 2-D mouse–pointer control. Genet Program Evolvable Mach 13, 377–405 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10710-012-9161-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10710-012-9161-x

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