Ontology-based mining of brainwaves: A sequence similarity technique for mapping alternative features in event-related potentials (ERP) data

Abstract

In this paper, we present a method for identifying correspondences, or mappings, between alternative features of brainwave activity in eventrelated potentials (ERP) data. The goal is to simulate mapping across results from heterogeneous methods that might be used in different neuroscience research labs. The input to the mapping consists of two ERP datasets whose spatiotemporal characteristics are captured by alternative sets of features, that is, summary spatial and temporal measures capturing distinct neural patterns that are linked to concepts in a set of ERP ontologies, called NEMO (Neural ElectroMagnetic Ontologies) [3, 6]. The feature value vector of each summary metric is transformed into a point-sequence curve, and clustering is performed to extract similar subsequences (clusters) representing the neural patterns that can then be aligned across datasets. Finally, the similarity between measures is derived by calculating the similarity between corresponding point-sequence curves. Experiment results showed that the proposed approach is robust and has achieved significant improvement on precision than previous algorithms. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.