Copyright © 2012 Ying Liu and Selin Aviyente. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Effective connectivity refers to the influence one neural system exerts on another and corresponds to the parameter of a model that tries to explain the observed dependencies. In this sense, effective connectivity corresponds to the intuitive notion of coupling or directed causal influence. Traditional measures to quantify the effective connectivity include model-based methods, such as dynamic causal modeling (DCM), Granger causality (GC), and information-theoretic methods. Directed information (DI) has been a recently proposed information-theoretic measure that captures the causality between two time series. Compared to traditional causality detection methods based on linear models, directed information is a model-free measure and can detect both linear and nonlinear causality relationships. However, the effectiveness of using DI for capturing the causality in different models and neurophysiological data has not been thoroughly illustrated to date. In addition, the advantage of DI compared to model-based measures, especially those used to implement Granger causality, has not been fully investigated. In this paper, we address these issues by evaluating the performance of directed information on both simulated data sets and electroencephalogram (EEG) data to illustrate its effectiveness for quantifying the effective connectivity in the brain.