Oracle Upper Bounds on Clean-EEG Recoverability from Single-Channel Decompositions Under EOG/EMG Contamination

Abstract

<jats:p>Objective: Single-channel EEG artifact suppression often relies on signal decomposition; however, it is not always clear how much clean EEG is recoverable from a given decomposition when component weighting is ideal. We present an oracle-based benchmark that characterises this best-case recoverability across common 1-D decomposition families under controlled EOG, EMG, and mixed contamination. This work does not propose a new denoising algorithm; rather, it isolates representation capacity from component-selection heuristics by computing an upper bound on reconstruction quality. Approach: Using EEGdenoiseNet, we constructed a synthetic benchmark of 4500 single-channel 2 s segments (125 Hz; T = 250) by mixing clean EEG with ocular (EOG) and/or cranial EMG exemplars at noise-to-signal ratios (NSRs) spanning −10 to +10 dB (floor −10 dB denotes an absent modality). We evaluated variational mode decomposition (VMD), singular spectrum analysis (SSA), discrete wavelet transform (DWT), and CEEMDAN by decomposing each mixture and reconstructing the clean EEG using a bounded nonnegative linear combination of components obtained via constrained least squares (the oracle). Main results: Under this oracle benchmark, SSA achieved the lowest reconstruction error in most tested conditions, while DWT tended to rank best in milder ocular regimes; VMD performance improved, with an increased mode count at higher computational cost. CEEMDAN exhibited higher latency dominated by ensemble settings. Significance: These results should be interpreted as decomposition-level upper bounds under controlled mixtures, not field-ready denoising performance. The benchmark provides a tool with which to compare representational recoverability across decompositions and to inform the subsequent design of practical component-selection strategies.</jats:p>