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.