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Evaluation of Empirical Mode Decomposition for Event-Related Potential Analysis

Abstract

Current methods for estimating event-related potentials (ERPs) assume stationarity of the signal. Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) is a data-driven decomposition technique that does not assume stationarity. We evaluated an EMD-based method for estimating the ERP. On simulated data, EMD substantially reduced background EEG while retaining the ERP. EMD-denoised single trials also estimated shape, amplitude, and latency of the ERP better than raw single trials. On experimental data, EMD-denoised trials revealed event-related differences between two conditions (condition A and B) more effectively than trials lowpass filtered at 40 Hz. EMD also revealed event-related differences on both condition A and condition B that were clearer and of longer duration than those revealed by low-pass filtering at 40 Hz. Thus, EMD-based denoising is a promising data-driven, nonstationary method for estimating ERPs and should be investigated further.

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Correspondence to N. Williams.

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Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Williams, N., Nasuto, S.J. & Saddy, J.D. Evaluation of Empirical Mode Decomposition for Event-Related Potential Analysis. EURASIP J. Adv. Signal Process. 2011, 965237 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1155/2011/965237

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1155/2011/965237

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