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Concurrence: A dependence criterion for time series, applied to biological data

Published: December 17, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2512.16001v1

By: Evangelos Sariyanidi , John D. Herrington , Lisa Yankowitz and more

Measuring the statistical dependence between observed signals is a primary tool for scientific discovery. However, biological systems often exhibit complex non-linear interactions that currently cannot be captured without a priori knowledge or large datasets. We introduce a criterion for dependence, whereby two time series are deemed dependent if one can construct a classifier that distinguishes between temporally aligned vs. misaligned segments extracted from them. We show that this criterion, concurrence, is theoretically linked with dependence, and can become a standard approach for scientific analyses across disciplines, as it can expose relationships across a wide spectrum of signals (fMRI, physiological and behavioral data) without ad-hoc parameter tuning or large amounts of data.

Category
Electrical Engineering and Systems Science:
Signal Processing