Papers › Statistical analysis of periodic data in neuroscience
Statistical analysis of periodic data in neuroscience
Daniel H. Baker
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
Many experimental paradigms in neuroscience involve driving the nervous system with periodic sensory stimuli. Neural signals recorded using a variety of techniques will then include phase-locked oscillations at the stimulation frequency. The analysis of such data often involves standard univariate statistics such as T-tests, conducted on the Fourier amplitude components (ignoring phase), either to test for the presence of a signal, or to compare signals across different conditions. However, the assumptions of these tests will sometimes be violated because amplitudes are not normally distributed, and furthermore weak signals might be missed if the phase information is discarded. An alternative approach is to conduct multivariate statistical tests using the real and imaginary Fourier components. Here the performance of two multivariate extensions of the T-test are compared: Hotelling's T² and a variant called T²_(circ). A novel test of the assumptions of T²_(circ) is developed, based on the condition index of the data (the square root of the ratio of eigenvalues of a bounding ellipse), and a heuristic for excluding outliers using the Mahalanobis distance is proposed. The T²_(circ) statistic is then extended to multi-level designs, resulting in a new statistical test termed ANOVA²_(circ). This has identical assumptions to T²_(circ), and is shown to be more sensitive than MANOVA when these assumptions are met. The use of these tests is demonstrated for two publicly available empirical data sets, and practical guidance is suggested for choosing which test to run. Implementations of these novel tools are provided as an R package and a Matlab toolbox, in the hope that their wider adoption will improve the sensitivity of statistical inferences involving periodic data.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections