How forgiving are M/EEG inverse solutions to noise level misspecification? An excursion into the BSI-Zoo.

AO_SCPLOWBSTRACTC_SCPLOWBrain source imaging (BSI), also known as source localization, from magneto- and electroencephalographic (M/EEG) data, is a challenging ill-posed inverse problem. Accurate source estimation is sensitive to modeling parameters, such as regularization strength and noise level, where misconfigurations can lead to under- or overfitting. Different BSI methods, however, may vary in their robustness to suboptimal parameter choices. Here we conducted extensive simulations of brain sources superimposed by varying degrees of sensor noise to study the ranges of noise misspecification within which different BSI approaches can still localize well. Using the Earth Movers Distance (EMD) and other metrics, we compare the performance of smooth linear inverse solutions with that of sparse non-linear Bayesian learning solutions. Additionally, we assess the effectiveness of various noise estimation and cross-validation techniques to select hyperparameters close to those achieving optimal localization. Methods and experiments are made available within the BSI-Zoo Python package.