Abstract. This article reports on a comparative study to identify electroencephalography (EEG) signals during motor imagery (MI) for motor area EEG and all-channels EEG in the Brain Computer Interface (BCI) application. In this paper, we present two algorithms: CC-LS-SVM and CC-LR for MI tasks classification. The CC-LS-SVM algorithm combines the cross-correlation (CC) technique and the least square support vector machine (LS-SVM). The CC-LR algorithm assembles the cross-correlation (CC) technique and binary logistic regression (LR) model. These two algorithms are implemented on the motor area EEG and the all-channels EEG to investigate how well they perform and also to test which area EEG is better for the MI classification. These two algorithms are also compared with some existing methods which reveal their competitive performance during classification. Results on both datasets, IVa and IVb from BCI Competition III, show that the CC-LS-SVM algorithm performs better than the CC-LR algorithm on both the motor area EEG and the all-channels EEG. The results also demonstrate that the CC-LS-SVM algorithm performs much better for the all-channels EEG than for the motor area EEG. Furthermore, the LS-SVM based approach can correctly identify the discriminative MI tasks, demonstrating the algorithm's superiority in classification performance over some existing methods.