Dynamic stopping using eSVM scores analysis for event-related potential brain-computer interfaces

In brain-computer interface (BCI) research, there must be a trade-off between accuracy and speed of the BCI system, especially those based on event-related potentials (ERPs). This paper proposes a novel method which can significantly increase the spelling bit rate while also maintaining the desired accuracy. We provide an adaptive real-time stopping method based on the scores of ensemble support vector machine classifiers. We apply a criteria assessment process on the classifiers' scores to dynamically stop the ERP-evoked paradigms at any flashing sequence. Our experiments were conducted on three different P300-Speller data sets (BCI Competition II, BCI Competition III and Akimpech). Our proposed framework significantly outperformed the related state-of-the-art studies in terms of character output accuracy and elicitation bit rate rise between static and dynamic stopping schemes. We improve the average bit rate by over 80% while perfectly maintaining the best original static accuracy of over 96%.