EEG signals are usually collected by placing multiple electrodes at various positions along the scalp as multi-channel data. Given that many channels are collected for each single-trial, the multi-channel EEG classification problem can be treated as multivariate time series classification problem. For multi-channel EEG data to be more accurately classified, we propose an algorithm, called the Fuzzy Multi-Channel EEG Classifier (FMCEC). This algorithm can take into consideration the interaction among different signals collected at different time instants and locations on the skull when constructing a classifier. The FMCEC first pre-process raw EEG data by eliminating noise by discretization of the data. It then performs fuzzification of the resulting discretized data to capture imprecision and vagueness in the data. Given the fuzzified data, FMCEC then discovers intra-channel patterns within each channel and then inter-channel patterns between different channels of EEG signals. The discovered patterns, which are represented as fuzzy temporal patterns, are then used to characterize and differentiate between different classes of multi-channel EEG data. To evaluate the effectiveness of FMCEC, we tested it with several sets of real EEG datasets. The results show that the algorithm can be a promising tool for the classification of multi-Channel EEG data.

After 20 years of extensive study in psychology, some musical factors have been identified that can evoke certain kinds of emotions. However, the underlying mechanism of the relationship between music and emotion remains unanswered. This paper intends to find the genuine correlates of music emotion by exploring a systematic and quantitative framework. The task is formulated as a dimensionality reduction problem, which seeks the complete and compact feature set with intrinsic correlates for the given objectives. Since a song generally elicits more than one emotion, we explore dimensionality reduction techniques for multi-label classification. One challenging problem is that the hard label cannot represent the extent of the emotion and it is also difficult to ask the subjects to quantize their feelings. This work tries utilizing the electroencephalography (EEG) signal to solve this challenge. A learning scheme called EEG-based emotion smoothing ( E ² S) and a bilinear multi-emotion similarity preserving embedding (BME-SPE) algorithm are proposed. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework on standard dataset CAL-500. Several influential correlates have been identified and the classification via those correlates has achieved good performance. We build a Chinese music dataset according to the identified correlates and find that the music from different cultures may share similar emotions.

Background: Statistical data analysis, especially the advanced machine learning (ML) methods, have attracted considerable interest in clinical practices. We are looking for interpretability of the diagnostic/prognostic results that will bring confidence to doctors, patients and their relatives in therapeutics and clinical practice. When datasets are imbalanced in diagnostic categories, we notice that the ordinary ML methods might produce results overwhelmed by the majority classes diminishing prediction accuracy. Hence, it needs methods that could produce explicit transparent and interpretable results in decision-making, without sacrificing accuracy, even for data with imbalanced groups. Methods: In order to interpret the clinical patterns and conduct diagnostic prediction of patients with high accuracy, we develop a novel method, Pattern Discovery and Disentanglement for Clinical Data Analysis (cPDD), which is able to discover patterns (correlated traits/indicants) and use them to classify clinical data even if the class distribution is imbalanced. In the most general setting, a relational dataset is a large table such that each column represents an attribute (trait/indicant), and each row contains a set of attribute values (AVs) of an entity (patient). Compared to the existing pattern discovery approaches, cPDD can discover a small succinct set of statistically significant high-order patterns from clinical data for interpreting and predicting the disease class of the patients even with groups small and rare. Results: Experiments on synthetic and thoracic clinical dataset showed that cPDD can 1) discover a smaller set of succinct significant patterns compared to other existing pattern discovery methods; 2) allow the users to interpret succinct sets of patterns coming from uncorrelated sources, even the groups are rare/small; and 3) obtain better performance in prediction compared to other interpretable classification approaches. Conclusions: In conclusion, cPDD discovers fewer patterns with greater comprehensive coverage to improve the interpretability of patterns discovered. Experimental results on synthetic data validated that cPDD discovers all patterns implanted in the data, displays them precisely and succinctly with statistical support for interpretation and prediction, a capability which the traditional ML methods lack. The success of cPDD as a novel interpretable method in solving the imbalanced class problem shows its great potential to clinical data analysis for years to come.

Machine Learning has made impressive advances in many applications akin to human cognition for discernment. However, success has been limited in the areas of relational datasets, particularly for data with low volume, imbalanced groups, and mislabeled cases, with outputs that typically lack transparency and interpretability. The difficulties arise from the subtle overlapping and entanglement of functional and statistical relations at the source level. Hence, we have developed Pattern Discovery and Disentanglement System (PDD), which is able to discover explicit patterns from the data with various sizes, imbalanced groups, and screen out anomalies. We present herein four case studies on biomedical datasets to substantiate the efficacy of PDD. It improves prediction accuracy and facilitates transparent interpretation of discovered knowledge in an explicit representation framework PDD Knowledge Base that links the sources, the patterns, and individual patients. Hence, PDD promises broad and ground-breaking applications in genomic and biomedical machine learning.