The Roles of Statistics in Human Neuroscience

Chén, Oliver  Y.

doi:10.3390/brainsci9080194

Volume 9, Issue 8

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The Roles of Statistics in Human Neuroscience

Oliver Y. Chén^1,2,3

Institute of Biomedical Engineering, University of Oxford, Oxford OX1 3PJ, UK

Department of Psychology, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06510, USA

Laboratory of Neurobiology, University College London, London WC1E 6BT, UK

Brain Sci. 2019, 9(8), 194; https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci9080194

Received: 15 July 2019 / Accepted: 27 July 2019 / Published: 8 August 2019

(This article belongs to the Section Neuroimaging)

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Abstract

Statistics plays three important roles in brain studies. They are (1) the study of differences between brains in distinctive populations; (2) the study of the variability in the structure and functioning of the brain; and (3) the study of data reduction on large-scale brain data. I discuss these concepts using examples from past and ongoing research in brain connectivity, brain information flow, information extraction from large-scale neuroimaging data, and neural predictive modeling. Having dispensed with the past, I attempt to present a few areas where statistical science facilitates brain decoding and to write prospectively, in the light of present knowledge and in the quest for artificial intelligence, about questions that statistical and neurobiological communities could work closely together to address in the future. View Full-Text

Keywords: statistical neuroscience; brain connectivity; neural information flow; big brain data; feature selection; large-scale data decomposition; predictive modeling; brain decoding

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