Visualizing "EEG-Alcohol" Data with Matplotlib

In this lesson - we'll be using several plot types to explore EEG data, provided to us by the University of California, Irvine. They host the Machine Learning Repository, which has various datasets collected from and for academic research. All of the datasets they host are public and can be accessed and downloaded by anyone with an internet connection. Certain datasets have a citation policy - so make sure to read the policy before publishing the findings found by exploring a dataset.

We'll be using the EEG Database Data Set. It was formed during a large-scale study of 122 individuals, and the aim of the study was to examine EEG correlates of genetic predisposition to alcoholism.

The dataset is attributable to Henri Begleiter at the Neurodynamics Laboratory at the State University of New York Health Center at Brooklyn.

The individuals were separated into an alcoholic group and control group. To properly visualize data - we have to understand its domain. In this case, knowing the basics of EEG scanning will get us far - we can hardly work with an EEG dataset if we don't know what EEG scanning is, nor what the features are.

Each subject in the trial was shown either one or two stimuli - named S1 and S2. These stimuli were sampled from the 1980 Snodgrass and Vanderwart picture set. When two stimuli were shown - they could be matching or not (S1 = S2), and this feature was also written down in the dataset.