SEREEGA: Simulating Event-Related EEG Activity

Abstract

AbstractElectroencephalography (EEG) is a popular method to monitor brain activity, but it can be difficult to evaluate EEG-based analysis methods because no ground-truth brain activity is available for comparison. Therefore, in order to test and evaluate such methods, researchers often use simulated EEG data instead of actual EEG recordings, ensuring that it is known beforehand which e ects are present in the data. As such, simulated data can be used, among other things, to assess or compare signal processing and machine learn-ing algorithms, to model EEG variabilities, and to design source reconstruction methods. In this paper, we present SEREEGA, short for Simulating Event-Related EEG Activity. SEREEGA is a MATLAB-based open-source toolbox dedicated to the generation of sim-ulated epochs of EEG data. It is modular and extensible, at initial release supporting ve different publicly available head models and capable of simulating multiple different types of signals mimicking brain activity. This paper presents the architecture and general work ow of this toolbox, as well as a simulated data set demonstrating some of its functions.HighlightsSimulated EEG data has a known ground truth, which can be used to validate methods.We present a general-purpose open-source toolbox to simulate EEG data.It provides a single framework to simulate many different types of EEG recordings.It is modular, extensible, and already includes a number of head models and signals.It supports noise, oscillations, event-related potentials, connectivity, and more.