  We demonstrate in numerical experiments that estimators of strength and
directionality of coupling between oscillators based on modeling of their phase
dynamics [D.A. Smirnov and B.P. Bezruchko, Phys. Rev. E 68, 046209 (2003)] are
widely applicable. Namely, although the expressions for the estimators and
their confidence bands are derived for linear uncoupled oscillators under the
influence of independent sources of Gaussian white noise, they turn out to
allow reliable characterization of coupling from relatively short time series
for different properties of noise, significant phase nonlinearity of the
oscillators, and non-vanishing coupling between them. We apply the estimators
to analyze a two-channel human intracranial epileptic electroencephalogram
(EEG) recording with the purpose of epileptic focus localization.
