Testing the null hypothesis of the nonexistence of a preseizure state

A rapidly growing number of studies deals with the prediction of epileptic seizures. For this purpose, varioustechniques derived from linear and nonlinear time series analysis have been applied to the electroencephalogramof epilepsy patients. In none of these works, however, the performance of the seizure prediction statisticsis tested against a null hypothesis, an otherwise ubiquitous concept in science. In consequence, the evaluationof the reported performance values is problematic. Here, we propose the technique of seizure time surrogatesbased on a Monte Carlo simulation to remedy this deficit.