Upper limb complex movements decoding from pre-movement EEG signals using wavelet common spatial patterns

•Pre-movement EEG data in planning and preparation time-period can be used for accurate classification of complex movement.•Spatio-spectral features are extracted using a combination of stationary wavelet transform and common spatial patterns.•The gamma and beta frequency bands had the most contribution in the classification of complex movements•A subset the most effective EEG channels for the complex movement classification is distributed over the prefrontal and frontal areas of the brain. Decoding functional movements from electroencephalographic (EEG) activity for motor disability rehabilitation is essential to develop home-use brain-computer interface systems. In this paper, the classification of five complex functional upper limb movements is studied by using only the pre-movement planning and preparation recordings of EEG data. Nine healthy volunteers performed five different upper limb movements. Different frequency bands of the EEG signal are extracted by the stationary wavelet transform. Common spatial patterns are used as spatial filters to enhance separation of the five movements in each frequency band. In order to increase the efficiency of the system, a mutual information-based feature selection algorithm is applied. The selected features are classified using the k-nearest neighbor, support vector machine, and linear discriminant analysis methods. K-nearest neighbor method outperformed the other classifiers and resulted in an average classification accuracy of 94.0 ± 2.7% for five classes of movements across subjects. Further analysis of each frequency band's contribution in the optimal feature set, showed that the gamma and beta frequency bands had the most contribution in the classification. To reduce the complexity of the EEG recording system setup, we selected a subset of the 10 most effective EEG channels from 64 channels, by which we could reach an accuracy of 70%. Those EEG channels were mostly distributed over the prefrontal and frontal areas. Overall, the results indicate that it is possible to classify complex movements before the movement onset by using spatially selected EEG data.