[FieldTrip] When to detrend/demean
Vitória Magalhães Piai
vitoria.piai at gmail.com
Sat Jan 5 11:21:34 CET 2013
Dear ftrippers,
I'm having a discussion with a colleague on something that is still a
bit unclear to us. Since I trust the knowledge going around here a lot,
I thought it would be my best chance to get a good answer: When should
we demean/detrend?
As relevant background, our EEG datasets involve speech production on
every trial.
We read in the data, use ft_databrowser to mark the artefacts and then
do complete artefact rejection with ft_rejectartifact. The trials often
include speech (onset).
I see in the tutorial that the cfg for preprocessing is pretty simple,
and ft_preprocessing default has no detrend/demean.
But in the FT example 'Reading and pre-processing EEG data', the cfg is
cfg.demean = 'yes';
cfg.baselinewindow = [-0.2 0];
In my data, I used cfg.demean = 'yes'; with no cfg for the baseline
window because I don't want to correct the signal with a specific
interval (and I assume this will take the whole segment then).
Our concern is that, given that people speak during part of the trial
(always towards the end), using demean here is not a good idea (the
signal changes induced by moving the jaws, etc., are included in the
calculation). Is this necessarily the case or can it be fixed with
subsequent computations (see below)? Do I need to go through artefact
rejection again? My guess would be that the damage caused by having
demean here doesn't change that much where the eyeblinks are and I
always take quite broad windows to mark the artefacts, so at least for
the AR I should be safe, but I'd like to check that with you guys.
Then, when calculating ERPs, I had both demean and detrend before
timelocking.
But for the TFRs, I didn't do any of these (dunno why). I'm using the
ft_freqanalysis after the 2011 change (removing the first order linear
trend from the time domain data).
Do I need to redo my TFRs or is it enough if I do sanity checks and
everything is in place (like visual alpha and gamma, etc.)?
And my last question, for once and for all, so that I get it right next
time from the start (assuming that I'll always have EEG speech
production data with ERPs and TFRs analysed). Is this the best way to do it?
- preprocess with default (so NO detrend and NO demean)
- then demean and detrend for ft_timelockanalysis and ft_freqanalysis
Thanx a lot, and (keeping to the Dutch tradition) all the best for 2013!
Vitoria
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