What if my spiketrain or timing variables are empty for some trials.

[ehennestad]

Whats the advice if my spike train or timing variables are empty during some of the trials?

Sidenote:
To get my data accepted by the addTrial, function I added a condition to only test that the timing of events happen within the duration of the trial if the data input is nonempty. (The tests in line 18 and 28 does not work on empty vectors)

Then, when I compiled the SparseDesignMatrix it gave me a warning that the design matrix contains infs and nans. Could that be due to empty timing vectors?

[ehennestad]

I had forgotten to remove some nans from one of my variables, so that was the reason for the warning I received.

[memming]

Thanks for the report. Can you provide minimal reproducible code so I can quickly fix it?

[ehennestad]

    case 'timing'
        if max(size(trial.(vname))) ~= numel(trial.(vname))
            error('Timing must be 1 dimensional')
        end
        if ~isempty(trial.(vname)) % <-- Line added
            if min(trial.(vname)) < 0 || max(trial.(vname)) > trial.duration
                error('Timing out of bound 0 <= [%f, %f] <= %f',min(trial.(vname)), max(trial.(vname)), trial.duration);
            end
        end
    case 'value'
        % no restrictions on what values can be!
    case 'spike train'
        if ~isempty(trial.(vname)) % <-- Line added
            if min(trial.(vname)) < 0 || max(trial.(vname)) > trial.duration
                error('Spike timing out of bound 0 <= [%f, %f] <= %f',min(trial.(vname)), max(trial.(vname)), trial.duration);
            end
        end
    otherwise

[ehennestad]

The code is from line 17 and onwards in addTrial.m
I added the two if statements with comments after.

[memming]

Awesome. If you want to submit this fix yourself, feel free to send a pull request. I'll merge it so that you can get proper credit. (I was asking you how to replicate the problem.)

[aboharbf]

Hey, just as a heads up, this line appears to still need to be added to the base code. I just ran into the same issue and added these lines.