Robust comparison of simultaneous EEG recordings using Kalman filters and Gaussian mixture models

In this manuscript we propose a novel method to compare simultaneously recorded electroencephalography (EEG) signals from different devices. Although standard methods like correlation and spectral analysis give quantitative answers to this question, these methods often penalize certain artifacts such as eye blinking too strongly. In our analysis we instead utilize an unsupervised labeling technique to evaluate the matching of two signals by comparing their label sequences. The proposed method was successfully tested on artificial data, where it showed a reduced deviation from the ground truth compared to the correlation coefficient. Furthermore, the method was applied on a real use-case to assess the quality of a low-cost EEG device compared to a clinical one. Here it showed more consistent results than the correlation coefficient, while it also did not rely on outlier removal prior to the analysis. However, the proposed method still suffers from accidental matches of labels, so that unrelated data sets may be assigned an unexpectedly high matching score. This paper suggests extensions to the proposed method, which could improve this issue.