DRDCAE-STGNN: An End-to-End Discrimina-tive Autoencoder with Spatio-Temporal Graph Learning for Motor Imagery Classification

Abstract

Motor imagery (MI) based brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) hold significant potential for assistive technologies and neurorehabilitation. However, the precise and efficient decoding of MI remains challenging due to their non-stationary nature and low signal-to-noise ratio. This paper introduces a novel end-to-end deep learning framework of Discriminative Residual Dense Convolutional Autoencoder with Spatio-Temporal Graph Neural Network (DRDCAE-STGNN) to enhance the MI feature learning and classification. Specifically, the DRDCAE module leverages residual-dense connections to learn discriminative latent representations through joint reconstruction and classifica-tion, while the STGNN module captures dynamic spatial dependencies via a learnable graph adjacency matrix and models temporal dynamics using bidirectional long short-term memory (LSTM). Extensive evaluations on BCI Competition IV 2a, 2b, and PhysioNet datasets demonstrate state-of-the-art performance, with average accuracies of 95.42%, 97.51%, and 90.15%, respectively. Ablation studies confirm the contribution of each component, and interpreta-bility analysis reveals neurophysiologically meaningful connectivity patterns. Moreover, despite its complexity, the model maintains a feasible parameter count and an inference time of 0.32 ms per sample. These results indicate that our method offers a robust, accurate, and interpretable solution for MI-EEG decoding, with strong generalizability across subjects and tasks and meeting the requirements for potential real-time BCI applications.