Quantification of Time-Connectivity Patterns in Rapid Eye Movement Occurrences During Sleep

This communication presents accuracy bounds for a parameter (C) based on entropy and conditional entropy measurements quantifies overall clustering (time-connectivity) patterns in rapid movement (REM) occurrences during sleep. In particular, the effect of the characteristics of these time-connectivity patterns on C, as well as the effect of the number of REM´s on C, are studied through Monte Carlo simulations. An effort toward the establishment of sampling distributions and related variance bounds for C is outlined, and suggestions are presented for the efficient use of such a parameter with real data.