CADDA: Class-wise Automatic Differentiable Data Augmentation for EEG Signals

Cédric Rommel, Thomas Moreau, Joseph Paillard, Alexandre Gramfort

Keywords: Neuroscience, EEG, Sleep staging, Automatic data augmentation

Abstract: Data augmentation is a key element of deep learning pipelines, as it informs the network during training about transformations of the input data that keep the label unchanged. Manually finding adequate augmentation methods and parameters for a given pipeline is however rapidly cumbersome. In particular, while intuition can guide this decision for images, the design and choice of augmentation policies remains unclear for more complex types of data, such as neuroscience signals. Besides, class-dependent augmentation strategies have been surprisingly unexplored in the literature, although it is quite intuitive: changing the color of a car image does not change the object class to be predicted, but doing the same to the picture of an orange does. This paper investigates gradient-based automatic data augmentation algorithms amenable to class-wise policies with exponentially larger search spaces. Motivated by supervised learning applications using EEG signals for which good augmentation policies are mostly unknown, we propose a new differentiable relaxation of the problem. In the class-agnostic setting, results show that our new relaxation leads to optimal performance with faster training than competing gradient-based methods, while also outperforming gradient-free methods in the class-wise setting. This work proposes also novel differentiable augmentation operations relevant for sleep stage classification.

One-sentence Summary: We propose a new gradient-based automatic data augmentation technique where samples are transformed based on their labels, and demonstrate its relevance on EEG sleep staging data.