Learning from label proportions in brain-computer interfaces: Online unsupervised learning with guarantees

Objective: Using traditional approaches, a Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) requires the collection of calibration data for new subjects prior to online use. Calibration time can be reduced or eliminated e.g.~by transfer of a pre-trained classifier or unsupervised adaptive classification methods which learn from scratch and adapt over time. While such heuristics work well in practice, none of them can provide theoretical guarantees. Our objective is to modify an event-related potential (ERP) paradigm to work in unison with the machine learning decoder to achieve a reliable calibration-less decoding with a guarantee to recover the true class means. Method: We introduce learning from label proportions (LLP) to the BCI community as a new unsupervised, and easy-to-implement classification approach for ERP-based BCIs. The LLP estimates the mean target and non-target responses based on known proportions of these two classes in different groups of the data. We modified a visual ERP speller to meet the requirements of the LLP. For evaluation, we ran simulations on artificially created data sets and conducted an online BCI study with N=13 subjects performing a copy-spelling task. Results: Theoretical considerations show that LLP is guaranteed to minimize the loss function similarly to a corresponding supervised classifier. It performed well in simulations and in the online application, where 84.5% of characters were spelled correctly on average without prior calibration. Significance: The continuously adapting LLP classifier is the first unsupervised decoder for ERP BCIs guaranteed to find the true class means. This makes it an ideal solution to avoid a tedious calibration and to tackle non-stationarities in the data. Additionally, LLP works on complementary principles compared to existing unsupervised methods, allowing for their further enhancement when combined with LLP.