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 using Python 3.6.1. The code requires numpy.

The Python code is contained within the following file: PhaseCoherence.py

The script takes three inputs:

1. freq - this is a floating point value indicating the frequency to be analysed, in Hertz, e.g. 50.
2. 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)
3. 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 MATLAB code can be found in a separate repository: Phase-Coherence-for-MATLAB

This project is licensed under the MIT License; see the LICENSE file for details.

This project can be cited using the following DOI: