How to Improve the Reliability of Aperiodic Parameter Estimates in M/EEG: A Method Comparison

Interest in broadband aperiodic brain activity (1/f phenomenon) has increased exponentially over recent years, partly fueled by the development of tools to parameterize it (i.e., estimate its offset/intercept and exponent/slope) using the M/EEG power spectrum. Broadband aperiodic activity needs to be separated from narrowband periodic activity before its parameters are computed. A popular method, the fooof toolbox, is based on the data-driven detection of narrowband-periodic peaks, whose maximum number is set by the user. While increasing analytic flexibility, variability in the number of detected peaks may increase sensitivity to noise and reduce the reliability of aperiodic parameter estimates and the power of analytic pipelines. Here, we present an investigation of the effects of analytic choices (e.g., number of peaks, spectral estimation method) on metrics indicating the adequacy of spectral parametrization. These include the internal consistency (odd-even reliability) of aperiodic estimates, the number of outliers generated, and their ability to detect effects. Across two different data sets (resting state and task-based), we found a decrease in the reliability of intercept and slope estimates as more peaks were allowed to be extracted. To ameliorate this problem, we propose a theory-driven modification of fooof labeled censored regression, whereby a theory-driven range of frequencies expected to contain periodic activity is removed from all spectra, and the remaining power values are regressed on the remaining frequencies to obtain parameter estimates. This method shows more reliable and robust estimates compared to fooof, while avoiding overfitting.