Individual alpha peak frequency based features for subject dependent EEG workload classification

Abstract

The individual alpha peak frequency (IAPF) is an important biological indicator in Electroencephalogram (EEG) studies, with many research publications linking it to various cognitive functions. In this paper, we propose novel Power Spectral Density (PSD) alpha features based on IAPF to classify 2 and 4 levels of EEG multitasking workload data. When optimized IAPF was considered, a 1.55% and 1.56% increase in average accuracy for 48 subjects' data, with 35 and 33 subjects showing improvement was observed for 2 and 4 class cases respectively. This trend suggests that individual specific features are able to improve classification performance compared to generalized features for subject dependent cases. The proposed features, which incorporates the biological meaning of the IAPF and provides subject specific information, can be considered as a viable alternative to the general alpha power feature when designing novel subject dependent feature sets for BCI workload recognition applications.