Estimation and testing problems in auditory neuroscience via clustering
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Updated: Mar 8, 2026

Infant Auditory Processing and Event-related Brain Oscillations
Published on: July 1, 2015
Youngdeok Hwang1, Samantha Wright2, Bret M Hanlon3
1Department of Statistics, Sungkyunkwan University, 03063 Seoul, Korea.
Abstract:
The processing of auditory information in neurons is an important area in neuroscience. We consider statistical analysis for an electrophysiological experiment related to this area. The recorded synaptic current responses from the experiment are observed as clusters, where the number of clusters is related to an important characteristic of the auditory system. This number is difficult to estimate visually because the clusters are blurred by biological variability. Using singular value decomposition and a Gaussian mixture model, we develop an estimator for the number of clusters. Additionally, we provide a method for hypothesis testing and sample size determination in the two-sample problem. We illustrate our approach with both simulated and experimental data.
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