Mass-Univariate Hypothesis Testing on MEEG Data using Cross-Validation
This work addresses a specific bottleneck in neuroimaging analysis for researchers, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing statistical and computational methods.
The authors tackled the problem of high false discovery rates in mass-univariate hypothesis testing for MEEG data by proposing a new method based on cross-validation and hierarchical classification, which they claim is more reliable and sensitive for detecting narrow effects in brain activities.
Recent advances in statistical theory, together with advances in the computational power of computers, provide alternative methods to do mass-univariate hypothesis testing in which a large number of univariate tests, can be properly used to compare MEEG data at a large number of time-frequency points and scalp locations. One of the major problematic aspects of this kind of mass-univariate analysis is due to high number of accomplished hypothesis tests. Hence procedures that remove or alleviate the increased probability of false discoveries are crucial for this type of analysis. Here, I propose a new method for mass-univariate analysis of MEEG data based on cross-validation scheme. In this method, I suggest a hierarchical classification procedure under k-fold cross-validation to detect which sensors at which time-bin and which frequency-bin contributes in discriminating between two different stimuli or tasks. To achieve this goal, a new feature extraction method based on the discrete cosine transform (DCT) employed to get maximum advantage of all three data dimensions. Employing cross-validation and hierarchy architecture alongside the DCT feature space makes this method more reliable and at the same time enough sensitive to detect the narrow effects in brain activities.