2,131 research outputs found
Time and spectral domain relative entropy: A new approach to multivariate spectral estimation
The concept of spectral relative entropy rate is introduced for jointly
stationary Gaussian processes. Using classical information-theoretic results,
we establish a remarkable connection between time and spectral domain relative
entropy rates. This naturally leads to a new spectral estimation technique
where a multivariate version of the Itakura-Saito distance is employed}. It may
be viewed as an extension of the approach, called THREE, introduced by Byrnes,
Georgiou and Lindquist in 2000 which, in turn, followed in the footsteps of the
Burg-Jaynes Maximum Entropy Method. Spectral estimation is here recast in the
form of a constrained spectrum approximation problem where the distance is
equal to the processes relative entropy rate. The corresponding solution
entails a complexity upper bound which improves on the one so far available in
the multichannel framework. Indeed, it is equal to the one featured by THREE in
the scalar case. The solution is computed via a globally convergent matricial
Newton-type algorithm. Simulations suggest the effectiveness of the new
technique in tackling multivariate spectral estimation tasks, especially in the
case of short data records.Comment: 32 pages, submitted for publicatio
A simple method for detecting chaos in nature
Chaos, or exponential sensitivity to small perturbations, appears everywhere
in nature. Moreover, chaos is predicted to play diverse functional roles in
living systems. A method for detecting chaos from empirical measurements should
therefore be a key component of the biologist's toolkit. But, classic
chaos-detection tools are highly sensitive to measurement noise and break down
for common edge cases, making it difficult to detect chaos in domains, like
biology, where measurements are noisy. However, newer tools promise to overcome
these limitations. Here, we combine several such tools into an automated
processing pipeline, and show that our pipeline can detect the presence (or
absence) of chaos in noisy recordings, even for difficult edge cases. As a
first-pass application of our pipeline, we show that heart rate variability is
not chaotic as some have proposed, and instead reflects a stochastic process in
both health and disease. Our tool is easy-to-use and freely available
How random is your heart beat?
We measure the content of random uncorrelated noise in heart rate variability
using a general method of noise level estimation using a coarse grained
entropy. We show that usually - except for atrial fibrillation - the level of
such noise is within 5 - 15% of the variance of the data and that the
variability due to the linearly correlated processes is dominant in all cases
analysed but atrial fibrillation. The nonlinear deterministic content of heart
rate variability remains significant and may not be ignored.Comment: see http://urbanowicz.org.p
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