Enhancing P300-Based Brain-Computer Interfaces with Hybrid Transfer Learning: A Data Alignment and Fine-Tuning Approach

A new approach is introduced to address the subject dependency problem in P300-based brain-computer interfaces (BCI) by using transfer learning. The occurrence of P300, an event-related potential, is primarily associated with changes in natural neuron activity and elicited in response to infrequent stimuli, which can be monitored non-invasively through an electroencephalogram. However, implementing P300-based BCI in real-time requires many training samples and time-consuming calibration, making it challenging to use in practical applications. To tackle these challenges, the proposed approach harnesses the high-level feature extraction capability of a deep neural network, achieved through fine-tuning. To ensure similar distributions of feature extraction data, the approach of aligning data in Euclidean space is employed, which is then applied to a discriminatively restricted Boltzmann machine with a single layer for P300 detection. The performance of the proposed method on the BCI Competition III dataset II and the BCI competition II dataset II, the state-of-the-art dataset, was evaluated and compared with previous studies. The results showed that robust performance could be achieved using a small number of training samples, demonstrating the effectiveness of the transfer learning approach in P300-based BCI applications.