Described is a system for feature selection that extends supervised hierarchical clustering to neural activity signals. The system generates, using a hierarchical clustering process, a hierarchical dendrogram representing a set of neural activity data comprising individual neural data elements having neural activity patterns. The hierarchical dendrogram is searched for an optimal cluster parcellation using a stochastic supervised search process. An optimal cluster parcellation of the hierarchical dendrogram is determined that provides a classification of the set of neural activity data with respect to a supervised classifier, resulting in a reduced neural activity feature set. The set of neural activity data is classified using the reduced neural activity feature set, and the classified set of neural activity data is decoded.
Feature selection of neural activity using hierarchical clustering with stochastic search