Feature selection of EEG signals in neuromarketing

Abstract

Brain–computer interface (BCI) technology uses electrophysiological (EEG) signals to detect user intent. Research on BCI has seen rapid advancement, with researchers proposing and implementing several signal processing and machine learning approaches for use in different contexts. BCI technology is also used in neuromarketing to study the brain’s responses to marketing stimuli. This study sought to detect two preference states (like and dislike) in EEG neuromarketing data using the proposed EEG-based consumer preference recognition system. This study investigated the role of feature selection in BCI to improve the accuracy of preference detection for neuromarketing. Several feature selection methods were used for benchmark testing in multiple BCI studies. Four feature selection approaches, namely, principal component analysis (PCA), minimum redundancy maximum relevance (mRMR), recursive feature elimination (RFE), and ReliefF, were used with five different classifiers: deep neural network (DNN), support vector machine (SVM), k-nearest neighbors (KNN), linear discriminant analysis (LDA), and random forest (RF). The four approaches were compared to evaluate the importance of feature selection. Moreover, the performance of classification algorithms was evaluated before and after feature selection. It was found that feature selection for EEG signals improves the performance of all classifiers.

Keywords

• Neuromarketing
• Brain computer interface (BCI)
• Electroencephalogram (EEG)
• Deep neural network (DNN)
• Consumer preferences