Stable feature selection for EEG-based emotion recognition

Affective brain-computer interface (aBCI) introduces personal affective factors into human-computer interactions, which could potentially enrich the user's experience during the interaction with a computer. However, affective neural patterns are volatile even within the same subject. To maintain satisfactory emotion recognition accuracy, the state-of-the-art aBCIs mainly tailor the classifier to the subject-of-interest and require frequent re-calibrations for the classifier. In this paper, we demonstrate that the recognition accuracy of aBCIs deteriorates when re-calibration is ruled out during the long-term usage for the same subject. Then, we propose a stable feature selection method to choose the most stable affective features, for mitigating the accuracy deterioration to a lesser extent and maximizing the aBCI performance in the long run. We validate our method on a dataset comprising six subjects' EEG data collected during two sessions per day for each subject for eight consecutive days.