Using machine-learning methodologies to analyze EEG signals becomes increasingly attractive for recognizing human emotions because of the objectivity of physiological data and the capability of the learning principles on modeling emotion classifiers from heterogeneous features. However, the conventional subject-specific classifiers may induce additional burdens to each subject for preparing multiple-session EEG data as training sets. To this end, we developed a new EEG feature selection approach, transfer recursive feature elimination (T-RFE), to determine a set of the most robust EEG indicators with stable geometrical distribution across a group of training subjects and a specific testing subject. A validating set is introduced to independently determine the optimal hyper-parameter and the feature ranking of the T-RFE model aiming at controlling the overfitting. The effectiveness of the T-RFE algorithm for such cross-subject emotion classification paradigm has been validated by DEAP database. With a linear least square support vector machine classifier implemented, the performance of the T-RFE is compared against several conventional feature selection schemes and the statistical significant improvement has been found. The classification rate and F-score achieve 0.7867, 0.7526, 0.7875, and 0.8077 for arousal and valence dimensions, respectively, and outperform several recent reported works on the same database. In the end, the T-RFE based classifier is compared against two subject-generic classifiers in the literature. The investigation of the computational time for all classifiers indicates the accuracy improvement of the T-RFE is at the cost of the longer training time.

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have achieved great success in visual recognition because of the availability of large-scale image datasets, such as the ImageNet. The transfer of convolutional features to challenging scene recognition remains an open problem. Multiple non-linear transforms endow the convolutional features with abundant information. On the other side, CNNs are adept at capturing the holistic appearances of scenes, whereas the lack of some critical local details may reduce the recognition accuracy. To address these problems, we propose a novel hierarchical coding algorithm to learn effective representations. To adapt the scale variations, many useful patches with various scales sampled from the whole image are considered to provide the sufficient details. Non-negative sparse decomposition model (NNSD) based on convolutional features is proposed to learn the sharable components for each scale and further produce global signatures. Based on the global signatures, inter-class linear coding (ICLC) is proposed to learn the discriminative components and ultimate image representations. Experimental results indicate that our approach significantly improves the recognition accuracy compared with general CNN models and achieves excellent performance on five standard benchmarks.

Existing methods for learning-style recognition are highly subjective and difficult to implement. Therefore, the present study aimed to develop a learning-style recognition mechanism based on EEG features. The process for the mechanism included labeling learners’ actual learning styles, designing a method to effectively stimulate different learners’ internal state differences regarding learning styles, designing the data-collection method, designing the preprocessing procedure, and constructing the recognition model. In this way, we designed and verified an experimental method that can effectively stimulate learning-style differences in the information-processing dimension. In addition, we verified the effectiveness of using EEG signals to recognize learning style. The recognition accuracy of the learning-style processing dimension was 71.2%. This result is highly significant for the further exploration of using EEG signals for effective learning-style recognition.