Same Brain, Different Prediction: How Preprocessing Choices Undermine EEG Decoding Reliability

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2605.07212v1
• Date: Fri, 08 May 2026 03:58:58 GMT
• Title: Same Brain, Different Prediction: How Preprocessing Choices Undermine EEG Decoding Reliability
• Abstract summary: We formalize preprocessing choices as a counterfactual intervention space and show that EEG predictions are surprisingly unstable under this space.<n>We provide three tools to make this instability measurable, decomposable, and reducible.
• Score: 10.719428311874752
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Electroencephalography (EEG) is a cornerstone of brain-computer interfaces and clinical neuroscience, yet deep learning models are typically trained and evaluated under a single, unreported preprocessing pipeline. We formalize preprocessing choices as a counterfactual intervention space and show that EEG predictions are surprisingly unstable under this space: across six datasets spanning four paradigms, up to 42% of trial-level predictions flip when only the preprocessing changes, a variability that standard uncertainty methods do not explicitly quantify because they condition on a fixed preprocessing pipeline. We provide three tools to make this instability measurable, decomposable, and reducible. First, a Walsh-Hadamard decomposition of the 2^7 pipeline space reveals that sensitivity is near-additive in practice under the binary intervention design, enabling efficient step-by-step optimization. Second, we introduce Preprocessing Uncertainty (PU), a per-trial diagnostic that captures a dimension of instability complementary to model-based confidence. Third, we study Normalized Adaptive PGI (NA-PGI), a graph-structured regularizer that exploits the compositional structure of preprocessing interventions as one mitigation strategy with clear scope conditions.

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