Nitime: time-series analysis for neuroimaging data

Nitime is a library for the analysis of time-series developed as part of the Nipy project, an eort to build open-source libraries for neuroimaging research. While nitime is developed primarily with neuroimaging data in mind (espespecially functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging data), its design is generic enough that it should be useful to other fields with experimental time-series. The package starts from a purely functional set of algorithms for time-series analysis, including spectral transforms, event-related analysis and coherency. An objectoriented layer is separated into lightweight data container objects for the representation of time-series data and high-level analyzer objects that couple data storage and algorithms. Each analyzer is designed to deal with a particular family of analysis methods and exposes a high-level object oriented interface to the underlying numerical algorithms. We briefly describe functional neuroimaging and some of the unique considerations applicable to time-series analysis of data acquired using these techniques, and provide examples of using nitime to analyze both synthetic data and real-world neuroimaging time-series.