Improved robust weighted averaging for event-related potentials in EEG

The aim of this study was to improve the robust weighted averaging based on criterion function minimization and assess its effectiveness for extracting event-related brain potentials (ERP) from electroencephalographic (EEG) recordings. The areas of improvement include significantly lower averaging error (45% lower RMSE and 37% lower maximum difference than for original implementation) and increased robustness to local minima, strong outliers and corrupted epochs common to real-life EEG signals, especially from low-cost devices. Our proposed procedure was tested on two datasets, one artificially generated for purposes of this study (including different noise sources) and one real-life dataset collected with Emotiv EPOC+. The lower error results mainly from more effective rejection (lowering the weights) of corrupted epochs by integrating the correlation-based weighting. The advantages of our method over pure correlation-based weighting are lower RMSE (up to two times) and robustness to the algorithm initialization and strong outliers. The performance of the methods was measured using bootstrap testing to avoid dependency of results on data. It shows that our improvements lead to significantly lower error, especially when the EEG signal is not filtered. The values of the parameters were adjusted for EEG signals but they can easily be incorporated in other repetitive electrophysiological measurement techniques.