During my PhD I used the Multivariate Pattern Analysis Toolbox (www.pni.princeton.edu/mvpa), a Matlab-based toolbox to facilitate multi-voxel pattern analysis of neuroimaging data. I’ve made several alterations/additions to the tool, which others might find useful:
Data preprocessing
Multiclass SVM Classification
Just a note, as lots of people have asked:
The MVPA toolbox contains a two class SVM classifier (train_svm). Ryan Mruczek wrote a wrapper for the Chih-Chung Chang and Chih-Jen Lin’s svm library, and posted it on the MVPA group. We’ve hosted the train and test files here for ease of use. To use it, you will also need to download libSVM from the download section of Chang and Lin’s SVM website.
Boltzmann Machine pattern classifier for fMRI using the MVPA toolbox
The MVPA toolbox contains several classifiers such as linear regression, support vector machines etc. To supplement these, we have worked on a generative classifier which uses Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBM). The general principle behind an individual RBM is that one alters the weights to make the visible nodes activity similar to one of the classes of training data. This can be used as a generative classifier by seeing which of a set of RBMs has the lowest free energy when the test data is applied. The one with the lowest has been trained (probably) on data most similar to the test data. It is based on work by Tanya Schmah, Geoffrey Hinton, et al.
The training and test scripts are available here:
train_rbm.m, test_rbm.m [to add, needs to be recovered from archive]
Psychophysics
One of the great contributions of psychophysics to psychology is the notion of measuring threshold, i.e. the signal strength required for a criterion level of response by the observer. Watson and Pelli (1983) described a maximum likelihood procedure, which they called QUEST, for estimating threshold. The Quest algorithm is an adaptive staircase method, you can think of it as a Bayesian toolbox for testing observers and estimating their thresholds. We have written Python implementations of the Quest algorithm that you can download here:
files: quest.py, test_quest.py [to add, need to be recovered from archive]