Unsupervised Machine Learning Methods for Artifact Removal in Electrodermal Activity

Artifact detection and removal is a crucial step in all data preprocessing pipelines for physiological time series data, especially when collected outside of controlled experimental settings. The fact that such artifact is often readily identifiable by eye suggests that unsupervised machine learning algorithms may be a promising option that do not require manually labeled training datasets. Existing methods are often heuristic-based, not generalizable, or developed for controlled experimental settings with less artifact. In this study, we test the ability of three such unsupervised learning algorithms, isolation forests, 1-class support vector machine, and K-nearest neighbor distance, to remove heavy cautery-related artifact from electrodermal activity (EDA) data collected while six subjects underwent surgery. We first defined 12 features for each half-second window as inputs to the unsupervised learning methods. For each subject, we compared the best performing unsupervised learning method to four other existing methods for EDA artifact removal. For all six subjects, the unsupervised learning method was the only one successful at fully removing the artifact. This approach can easily be expanded to other modalities of physiological data in complex settings.