Working with Epoch metadata#

Viewing Epochs metadata#

The metadata attached to Epochs objects is stored as a pandas.DataFrame containing one row for each epoch. The columns of this DataFrame can contain just about any information you want to store about each epoch; in this case, the metadata encodes information about the stimulus seen on each trial, including properties of the visual word form itself (e.g., NumberOfLetters, VisualComplexity) as well as properties of what the word means (e.g., its Concreteness) and its prominence in the English lexicon (e.g., WordFrequency). Here are all the variables; note that in a Jupyter notebook, viewing a pandas.DataFrame gets rendered as an HTML table instead of the normal Python output block:

epochs.metadata

Viewing the metadata values for a given epoch and metadata variable is done using any of the Pandas indexing methods such as loc, iloc, at, and iat. Because the index of the dataframe is the integer epoch number, the name- and index-based selection methods will work similarly for selecting rows, except that name-based selection (with loc) is inclusive of the endpoint:

print('Name-based selection with .loc')
print(epochs.metadata.loc[2:4])

print('\nIndex-based selection with .iloc')
print(epochs.metadata.iloc[2:4])

Name-based selection with .loc
   WORD  ...  VisualComplexity
2  shot  ...         64.600033
3  cold  ...         63.657457
4  main  ...         68.945661

[3 rows x 8 columns]

Index-based selection with .iloc
   WORD  ...  VisualComplexity
2  shot  ...         64.600033
3  cold  ...         63.657457

[2 rows x 8 columns]

Modifying the metadata#

Like any pandas.DataFrame, you can modify the data or add columns as needed. Here we convert the NumberOfLetters column from float to integer data type, and add a boolean column that arbitrarily divides the variable VisualComplexity into high and low groups.

epochs.metadata['NumberOfLetters'] = \
    epochs.metadata['NumberOfLetters'].map(int)

epochs.metadata['HighComplexity'] = epochs.metadata['VisualComplexity'] > 65
epochs.metadata.head()

Selecting epochs using metadata queries#

All Epochs objects can be subselected by event name, index, or slice (see Subselecting epochs). But Epochs objects with metadata can also be queried using Pandas query strings by passing the query string just as you would normally pass an event name. For example:

print(epochs['WORD.str.startswith("dis")'])

<EpochsFIF |  8 events (all good), -0.1 - 0.92 sec, baseline off, ~499 kB, data loaded, with metadata,
 'district': 1
 'display': 1
 'disarray': 1
 'disaster': 1
 'disease': 1
 'discord': 1
 'disposal': 1
 'distance': 1>

This capability uses the pandas.DataFrame.query() method under the hood, so you can check out the documentation of that method to learn how to format query strings. Here’s another example:

print(epochs['Concreteness > 6 and WordFrequency < 1'])

<EpochsFIF |  4 events (all good), -0.1 - 0.92 sec, baseline off, ~267 kB, data loaded, with metadata,
 'lasso': 1
 'tentacle': 1
 'banjo': 1
 'corsage': 1>

Note also that traditional epochs subselection by condition name still works; MNE-Python will try the traditional method first before falling back on rich metadata querying.

epochs['solenoid'].plot_psd()

Using multitaper spectrum estimation with 7 DPSS windows

One use of the Pandas query string approach is to select specific words for plotting:

words = ['typhoon', 'bungalow', 'colossus', 'drudgery', 'linguist', 'solenoid']
epochs['WORD in {}'.format(words)].plot(n_channels=29)

Notice that in this dataset, each “condition” (A.K.A., each word) occurs only once, whereas with the Sample dataset each condition (e.g., “auditory/left”, “visual/right”, etc) occurred dozens of times. This makes the Pandas querying methods especially useful when you want to aggregate epochs that have different condition names but that share similar stimulus properties. For example, here we group epochs based on the number of letters in the stimulus word, and compare the average signal at electrode Pz for each group:

evokeds = dict()
query = 'NumberOfLetters == {}'
for n_letters in epochs.metadata['NumberOfLetters'].unique():
    evokeds[str(n_letters)] = epochs[query.format(n_letters)].average()

mne.viz.plot_compare_evokeds(evokeds, cmap=('word length', 'viridis'),
                             picks='Pz')

Metadata can also be useful for sorting the epochs in an image plot. For example, here we order the epochs based on word frequency to see if there’s a pattern to the latency or intensity of the response:

sort_order = np.argsort(epochs.metadata['WordFrequency'])
epochs.plot_image(order=sort_order, picks='Pz')

Not setting metadata
960 matching events found
No baseline correction applied
0 projection items activated

Although there’s no obvious relationship in this case, such analyses may be useful for metadata variables that more directly index the time course of stimulus processing (such as reaction time).

Adding metadata to an Epochs object#

You can add a metadata DataFrame to any Epochs object (or replace existing metadata) simply by assigning to the metadata attribute:

new_metadata = pd.DataFrame(data=['foo'] * len(epochs), columns=['bar'],
                            index=range(len(epochs)))
epochs.metadata = new_metadata
epochs.metadata.head()

Replacing existing metadata with 1 columns

You can remove metadata from an Epochs object by setting its metadata to None:

epochs.metadata = None

Removing existing metadata

Total running time of the script: ( 0 minutes 9.832 seconds)

Estimated memory usage: 78 MB

Gallery generated by Sphinx-Gallery