Evaluation of convolutional neural networks using a large multi-subject P300 dataset

Deep neural networks (DNN) have been studied in various machine learning areas. For example, event-related potential (ERP) signal classification is a highly complex task potentially suitable for DNN as signal-to-noise ratio is low, and underlying spatial and temporal patterns display a large intra- and intersubject variability. Convolutional neural networks (CNN) have been compared with baseline traditional models, i.e. linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and support vector machines (SVM) for single trial classification using a large multi-subject publicly available P300 dataset of school-age children (138 males and 112 females). For single trial classification, classification accuracy stayed between 62% and 64% for all tested classification models. When applying the trained classification models to averaged trials, accuracy increased to 76-79% without significant differences among classification models. CNN did not prove superior to baseline for the tested dataset. Comparison with related literature, limitations and future directions are discussed.