Aiming at feature selection problem of motor imagery task in brain computer interface (BCI), an algorithm based on mutual information and principal component analysis (PCA) for electroencephalogram (EEG) feature selection is presented. This algorithm introduces the category information, and uses the sum of mutual information matrices between features under different motor imagery category to replace the covariance matrix. The eigenvectors of the sum matrix represent the direction of the principal components and the eigenvalues of the sum matrix are used to determine the dimensionality of principal components. 2005 International BCI competition data set was used in our experiments, and four feature extraction methods were adopted, i. e. power spectrum estimation, continuous wavelet transform, wavelet packet decomposition and Hjorth parameters. The proposed feature selection algorithm was adopted to select and combine the most useful features for classification. The results showed that relative to the PCA algorithm, our algorithm had better performance in dimensionality reduction and in classification accuracy with the assistance of support vector machine classifier under the same dimensionality of principal components.
