Convolutional neural networks for classification of music-listening EEG: comparing 1D convolutional kernels with 2D kernels and cerebral laterality of musical influence

This paper highlights the ability of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) at classifying EEG data listening to different kinds of music without the requirement for handcrafted features. Deep learning architectures presented in this paper include CNN of different depths and different convolutional kernels. Support vector machine (SVM) taking in EEG features describing the frequency spectrum, signal regularity, and cross-channel correlation has been applied for performance comparison with CNN. The best performing CNN model presented in this paper achieves the tenfold cross-validation (CV) binary classification average accuracy of 98.94% (validation) and 97.46% (test), and the tenfold CV three-class classification accuracy of 97.68% (validation) and 95.71% (test). In comparison, the SVM classifier achieves tenfold CV binary classification accuracy of 80.23% (validation). The CNN model presented is able to not only differentiate EEG of subjects listening to music from that of subjects without auditory input, but it is also capable of accurately differentiating the EEG of subjects listening to different music. In the context of designing neural computing models for EEG analysis, this paper shows that decomposing two-dimensional spatiotemporal convolutional kernels into separate one-dimensional spatial and one-dimensional temporal kernels significantly reduces the number of trainable parameters (size) of the model while retaining the classification performance. This finding is useful, especially in designing CNN for memory-critical embedded systems for EEG processing. In neurological aspect, auditory stimulus is found to have altered the EEG pattern of the frontal lobe and the left cerebral hemisphere more than the other brain regions.