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, various techniques derived from linear and nonlinear time series analysis have been applied to the electroencephalogram of epilepsy patients. In none of these works, however, the performance of the seizure prediction statistics is tested against a null hypothesis, an otherwise ubiquitous concept in science. In consequence, the evaluation of the reported performance values is problematic. Here, we propose the technique of seizure time surrogates based on a Monte Carlo simulation to remedy this deficit.