The Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment (MICE) collaboration will demonstrate the feasibility of ionization cooling, the technique by which it is proposed to cool the muon beam at a future neutrino factory or muon collider. The position and momentum reconstruction of individual muons in the MICE trackers allows for the development of alternative figures of merit in addition to beam emittance. Contraction of the phase space volume occupied by a fraction of the sample, or equivalently the increase in phase space density at its core, is an unequivocal cooling signature. Single-particle amplitude and nonparametric statistics provide reliable methods to estimate the phase space density function. These techniques are robust to transmission losses and non-linearities, making them optimally suited to perform a quantitative cooling measurement in MICE.