title: Projection versus prewhitening for EEG interference suppression.
abstract: Suppression of strong, spatially correlated background interference is a challenge associated with electroencephalography (EEG) source localization problems. The most common way of dealing with such interference is through the use of a prewhitening transformation based on an estimate of the covariance of the interference plus noise. This approach is based on strong assumptions regarding temporal stationarity of the data, which do not commonly hold in EEG applications. In addition, prewhitening cannot typically be implemented directly due to ill conditioning of the covariance matrix, and ad hoc regularization is often necessary. Using both simulation examples and experiments involving real EEG data with auditory evoked responses, we demonstrate that a straightforward interference projection method is significantly more robust than prewhitening for EEG source localization.
authors.affiliation: Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697, USA. scwu@uci.edu
authors.forename: Shun Chi
authors.initials: SC
authors.lastname: Wu
authors.forename: A Lee
authors.initials: AL
authors.lastname: Swindlehurst
authors.forename: Po T
authors.initials: PT
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Zoran
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Nenadic
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001921:Brain / Q000033:anatomy & histology / Q000502:physiology; D003198:Computer Simulation; D004569:Electroencephalography / Q000379:methods*; D005072:Evoked Potentials, Auditory / Q000502:physiology; D006801:Humans; D015225:Magnetoencephalography; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D012815:Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted