Learning Subject-Generalized Topographical EEG Embeddings Using Deep Variational Autoencoders and Domain-Adversarial Regularization.

Two of the biggest challenges in building models for detecting emotions from electroencephalography (EEG) devices are the relatively small amount of labeled samples and the strong variability of signal feature distributions between different subjects. In this study, we propose a context-generalized model that tackles the data constraints and subject variability simultaneously using a deep neural network architecture optimized for normally distributed subject-independent feature embeddings. Variational autoencoders (VAEs) at the input level allow the lower feature layers of the model to be trained on both labeled and unlabeled samples, maximizing the use of the limited data resources.