Introduction to Random Fields

Abstract

General linear models (GLM) are often constructed and used in statistical inference at the voxel level in brain imaging. In this paper, we explore the basics of random fields and the multiple comparisons on the random fields, which are necessary to properly threshold statistical maps for the whole image at specific statistical significance level. The multiple comparisons are crucial in determining overall statistical significance in correlated test statistics over the whole brain. In practice, t- or F-statistics in adjacent voxels are correlated. So there is the problem of multiple comparisons, which we have simply neglected up to now. For multiple comparisons that account for spatially correlated test statistics, various methods were proposed: Bonferroni correction, random field theory, false discovery rates and permutation tests. Among them, we will explore the random field approach.