Abstract
Neural data analysis has increasingly incorporated causal information to study circuit connectivity. Dimensional reduction forms the basis of most analyses of large multivariate time series. Here, we present a new, multitaper-based decomposition for stochastic, multivariate time series that acts on the covariance of the time series at all lags, C(τ), as opposed to standard methods that decompose the time series, X(t), using only information at zero-lag. In both simulated and neural imaging examples, we demonstrate that methods that neglect the full causal structure may be discarding important dynamical information in a time series.