ICA Model Order Estimation Using Clustering Method

In this paper a novel approach for independent component analysis (ICA) model order estimation of movement electroencephalogram (EEG) signals is described. The application is targeted to the brain-computer interface (BCI) EEG preprocessing. The previous work has shown that it is possible to decompose EEG into movement-related and non-movement-related independent components (ICs). The selection of only movement related ICs might lead to BCI EEG classification score increasing. The real number of the independent sources in the brain is an important parameter of the preprocessing step. Previously, we used principal component analysis (PCA) for estimation of the number of the independent sources. However, PCA estimates only the number of uncorrelated and not independent components ignoring the higher-order signal statistics. In this work, we use another approach - selection of highly correlated ICs from several ICA runs. The ICA model order estimation is done at significance level α = 0.05 and the model order is less or more dependent on ICA algorithm and its parameters.