Chunk #30 — Materials and Methods — Experimental design and statistical analysis — Principle component analysis (PCA)

Source

Encoding of the Intent to Drink Alcohol by the Prefrontal Cortex Is Blunted in Rats with a Family History of Excessive Drinking.

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PCA was conducted to evaluate the predominant population-level firing rate dynamics. PCA is commonly used as a dimensionality reduction tool that requires minimal assumptions of the data (Cunningham and Yu, 2014). A single “omnibus” PCA was conducted on a matrix containing all data for all groups so that every possible comparison could be made statistically. This matrix included ensemble activity on drinking trials, non-drinking trials, and equally sized, randomly sampled data vectors (previously described null trials).