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Features of UnfoldMakie.jl

Or why this package is cool and you should use it.

  • Focused. UnfoldMakie.jl focuses exclusively on visualizing (r)ERPs, unlike other toolboxes such as EEGLAB, FieldTrip, Brainstorm, or MNE. This makes it easier to understand, use, and maintain the package in the future.

  • Customizable. The majority of EEG researchers perceive the flexibility of coding as the most important feature of the EEG toolbox. Consequently, users of UnfoldMakie.jl have great flexibility in customizing most aspects of the plots, such as colors, line styles, and axis decorations.

  • Combining plots. The layout system for subplots in Makie.jl makes it easy to combine and align various plot types.

  • Flexible mapping. With AlgebraOfGraphics.jl, it is easy to map conditions, groups, channels, or other features to a large variety of aesthetics like linestyle, color, marker, and others. It works similarly to the popular R package ggplot2.

  • Flexible data input. All functions support basic Arrays and tidy DataFrames.

  • Fast. Julia and Makie.jl allow fast plotting of figures with very complex layouts. For example, it can plot one figure with 50 topoplots in 1.9 seconds (1.6 sec with DelaunayMesh interpolation), which is approximately 20 times faster compared to EEGLAB. (Although the Python-based MNE is faster by one second.) For more details, see this page.

  • Faster updating. Makie.jl is incredibly fast at updating figures, which is beneficial for developing interactive tools and creating animations. UnfoldMakie.jl can create and save a topoplot gif file with 50 frames in 1.7 times less time than MNE (Table 2).

  • Interactive. Several plots in our package have interactive features. They are supported by Observables.jl, which allows for fast data exchange and quick plot updating.

  • Scientific color maps. According to our previous study (Mikheev, 2024), 40% of EEG researchers are not aware of the issue of perceptually non-uniform color maps. UnfoldMakie.jl uses scientific color maps throughout.

  • Documented. There is extensive documentation with many usage examples and docstrings.

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