Robust learning from corrupted EEG with dynamic spatial filtering

•We propose a method to handle data corruption in EEG recorded with very few channels.•An attention-based neural network reweighs EEG channels according to task relevance.•We validate the method on clinical EEG and at-home mobile EEG with strong corruption.•Our method outperforms other denoising strategies under strong channel corruption. Building machine learning models using EEG recorded outside of the laboratory setting requires methods robust to noisy data and randomly missing channels. This need is particularly great when working with sparse EEG montages (1–6 channels), often encountered in consumer-grade or mobile EEG devices. Neither classical machine learning models nor deep neural networks trained end-to-end on EEG are typically designed or tested for robustness to corruption, and especially to randomly missing channels. While some studies have proposed strategies for using data with missing channels, these approaches are not practical when sparse montages are used and computing power is limited (e.g., wearables, cell phones). To tackle this problem, we propose dynamic spatial filtering (DSF), a multi-head attention module that can be plugged in before the first layer of a neural network to handle missing EEG channels by learning to focus on good channels and to ignore bad ones. We tested DSF on public EEG data encompassing ∼4000 recordings with simulated channel corruption and on a private dataset of ∼100 at-home recordings of mobile EEG with natural corruption. Our proposed approach achieves the same performance as baseline models when no noise is applied, but outperforms baselines by as much as 29.4% accuracy when significant channel corruption is present. Moreover, DSF outputs are interpretable, making it possible to monitor the effective channel importance in real-time. This approach has the potential to enable the analysis of EEG in challenging settings where channel corruption hampers the reading of brain signals.