title: Measuring phase synchronization of superimposed signals.
abstract: Phase synchronization is an important phenomenon that occurs in a wide variety of complex oscillatory processes. Measuring phase synchronization can therefore help to gain fundamental insight into nature. In this Letter we point out that synchronization analysis techniques can detect spurious synchronization, if they are fed with a superposition of signals such as in electroencephalography or magnetoencephalography data. We show how techniques from blind source separation can help to nevertheless measure the true synchronization and avoid such pitfalls.
authors.affiliation: Fraunhofer FIRST.IDA, Kekuléstrasse 7, D-12489 Berlin, Germany. meinecke@first.fhg.de
authors.forename: Frank C
authors.initials: FC
authors.lastname: Meinecke
authors.forename: Andreas
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Ziehe
authors.forename: Jürgen
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Kurths
authors.forename: Klaus-Robert
authors.initials: KR
authors.lastname: Müller
mesh_terms: D008954:Models, Biological; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D009991:Oscillometry / Q000379:methods*; D044367:Phase Transition; D012815:Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted