Mixture Kernel Density Estimation and Remedied Correlation Matrix on the EEG-Based Copula Model for the Assessment of Visual Discomfort

Abstract

Since electroencephalogram (EEG) signals can directly provide information on changes in brain activity due to behaviour changes, how to assess visual discomfort through EEG signals attracts researchers’ attention. However, previous assessments based on time-domain EEG features lack sufficient consideration of the dependence among EEG signals, which may affect the discrimination to visual discomfort. Although the copula model can explore the dependence among variables, the EEG-based copula models still have the following deficiencies: (1) the methods ignoring the fine-grained information hidden in EEG signals could make the estimated marginal density function improper, and (2) the approaches neglecting the pseudo-correlation among data may inappropriately estimate the correlation matrix parameter of the copula density function. The mixture kernel density estimation (MKDE) and remedied correlation matrix (RCM) on the EEG-based copula model are proposed to mitigate the mentioned shortcomings. The simulation experiments show that MKDE can not only better estimate the marginal density function but also explore fine-grained information. The RCM can be closer to the real correlation matrix parameter. With the favourable quality of the proposed EEG-based model, it is used to extract time-domain EEG features to assess visual discomfort further. To our best knowledge, the extracted features present better discrimination to visual discomfort compared with the features extracted by the state-of-the-art method.