Dynamically Weighted Ensemble-based Prediction System for Adaptively Modeling Driver Reaction Time

Predicting a driver's cognitive state, or more specifically, modeling a driver's reaction time (RT) in response to the appearance of a potential hazard warrants urgent research. In the last two decades, the electric field that is generated by the activities in the brain, monitored by an electroencephalogram (EEG), has been proven to be a robust physiological indicator of human behavior. However, mapping the human brain can be extremely challenging, especially owing to the variability in human beings over time, both within and among individuals. Factors such as fatigue, inattention and stress can induce homeostatic changes in the brain, which affect the observed relationship between brain dynamics and behavioral performance, and thus make the existing systems for predicting RT difficult to generalize. To solve this problem, an ensemble-based weighted prediction system is presented herein. This system comprises a set of prediction submodels that are individually trained using groups of data with similar EEG-RT relationships. To obtain a final prediction, the prediction outcomes of the sub-models are then multiplied by weights that are derived from the EEG alpha coherences of 10 channels plus theta band powers of 30 channels, whose changes were found to be indicators of variations in the EEG-RT relationship. The results thus obtained reveal that the proposed system with a time-varying adaptive weighting mechanism significantly outperforms the conventional system in modeling a driver's RT. The adaptive design of the proposed system demonstrates its feasibility in coping with the variability in the brain-behavior relationship. In this contribution surprisingly simple EEG-based adaptive methods are used in combination with an ensemble scheme to significantly increase system performance.