Rethinking Generalized BCIs: Benchmarking 340,000+ Unique Algorithmic Configurations for EEG Mental Command Decoding

Robust decoding and classification of brain patterns measured with electroencephalography (EEG) remains a major challenge for real-world (i.e. outside scientific lab and medical facilities) brain-computer interface (BCI) applications due to well documented inter- and intra-participant variability.

Here, we present a large-scale benchmark evaluating over 340,000+ unique combinations of spatial and nonlinear EEG classification.

Our methodological pipeline consists in combinations of Common Spatial Patterns (CSP), Riemannian geometry, functional connectivity, and fractal- or entropy-based features across three open-access EEG datasets.

Unlike prior studies, our analysis operates at the per-participant level and across multiple frequency bands (8-15 Hz and 8-30 Hz), enabling direct assessment of both group-level performance and individual variability.

Covariance tangent space projection (cov-tgsp) and CSP consistently achieved the highest average classification accuracies.

However, their effectiveness was strongly dataset-dependent, and marked participant-level differences persisted, particularly in the most heterogeneous of the datasets.

Importantly, nonlinear methods outperformed spatial approaches for specific individuals, underscoring the need for personalized pipeline selection.

Our findings highlight that no universal 'one-size-fits-all' method can optimally decode EEG motor imagery patterns across all users or datasets.

Future work will require adaptive, multimodal, and possibly novel approaches to fully address neurophysiological variability in practical BCI applications where the system can automatically adapt to what makes each user unique.