Due to the sparsity of brain encoding, the neural ensemble signals recorded by microelectrode arrays contain a lot of noise and redundant information, which could reduce the stability and precision of decoding of motion intent. To solve this problem, we proposed a decoding method based on partial least squares (PLS) feature extraction in our study. Firstly, we extracted the features of spike signals using the PLS, and then classified them with support vector machine (SVM) classifier, and decoded them for motion intent. In this study, we decoded neural ensemble signals based on plus-maze test. The results have shown that the proposed method had a better stability and higher decoding accuracy, due to the PLS combined with classification model which overcame the shortcoming of PLS regression that was easily affected by accumulated effect of noise. Meanwhile, the PLS method extracted fewer features with more useful information in comparison with common feature extraction method. The decoding accuracy of real data sets were 93.59%, 84.00% and 83.59%, respectively.
