A Novel Multitaper Reassignment Method for Estimation of Phase Synchrony

The matched phase reassignment, developed to estimate phase synchrony of transient oscillatory signals, is extended into a multitaper phase reassignment (MTPR) method. The method gives perfect time-frequency localization for two transients with zero phase difference and estimates of time locations and oscillatory frequencies in low signal-to-noise ratios. For different signal-to-noise ratios between channels a suggestion of corrected reassignment vector expressions is given, resulting in minimized variance. The MTPR outperforms the matched phase reassignment as well as state-of-the-art methods, such as Pearson's linear correlation, time-frequency cross-spectrogram phase estimation and the Phase Lag Index method. An example of estimated phase differences, time locations and oscillatory frequencies of electrical signals measured from the brain is also shown.