Function to calculate consistency of phase at a given frequency across measurements
This function calculates phase coherence at a frequency of interest, across different measurements. The phase coherence value indexes how consistent the phase is across different measurements. The phase coherence value lies between 0 and 1: 1 indicates perfect phase coherence and 0 indicates no phase coherence.
This method is often used in electro-encephalography (EEG) analyses to determine the phase consistency of the neural response at a particular frequency, across trials. For example, researchers often choose to investigate phase consistency at the frequency of a presented stimulus. Note that the same method is sometimes referred to as the phase locking value (PLV)--although some implementations of the PLV use a time-series filter rather than conducting the analyses in the frequency domain, as used here.
The method is described in the following paper:
Picton, T. W., John, M. S., Dimitrijevic, A., & Purcell, D. (2003). Human auditory steady-state responses: Respuestas auditivas de estado estable en humanos. International journal of audiology, 42(4), 177-219.
This method could be applied to examine patterns in time-series data other than neural data.
The code was written using MATLAB 2014b, although uses basic MATLAB functions that are compatible with older and newer versions of MATLAB. No additional toolboxes are required.
The MATLAB code is contained within the following file: PhaseCoherence.m
The script takes three inputs:
- freq - this is a value indicating the frequency to be analysed, in Hertz, e.g. 50.
- timeSeries - this is the data to be analysed; should be a 2-dimensional matrix of size: (number of trials/measurements) x (number of time points)
- FS - this is the sampling rate of the time-series data, in Hertz, e.g. 1000.
The code can be run as follows:
PC = PhaseCoherence(freq, timeSeries, FS)
The output from the script is a floating-point value between 0 and 1.
There are two versions of the code, which perform the same computations and output: one for MATLAB and one for Python 3. The Python code can be found in a separate repository: Phase-Coherence-for-Python
This project is licensed under the MIT License; see the LICENSE file for details.
This project can be cited using the following DOI:
