Domain-Specific Processing Stage for Estimating Single-Trail Evoked Potential Improves CNN Performance in Detecting Error Potential

Abstract

We present a novel architecture designed to enhance the detection of Error Potential (ErrP) signals during ErrP stimulation tasks. In the context of predicting ErrP presence, conventional Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) typically accept a raw EEG signal as input, encompassing both the information associated with the evoked potential and the background activity, which can potentially diminish predictive accuracy. Our approach involves advanced Single-Trial (ST) ErrP enhancement techniques for processing raw EEG signals in the initial stage, followed by CNNs for discerning between ErrP and NonErrP segments in the second stage. We tested different combinations of methods and CNNs. As far as ST ErrP estimation is concerned, we examined various methods encompassing subspace regularization techniques, Continuous Wavelet Transform, and ARX models. For the classification stage, we evaluated the performance of EEGNet, CNN, and a Siamese Neural Network. A comparative analysis against the method of directly applying CNNs to raw EEG signals revealed the advantages of our architecture. Leveraging subspace regularization yielded the best improvement in classification metrics, at up to 14% in balanced accuracy and 13.4% in F1-score.