Physiological Time Series Processing via Empirical Wavelet Transform

This paper presents the efficacy of empirical wavelet transform (EWT) for physiological time series processing. At first, EWT is applied to multivariate heterogeneous physiological time series. Secondly, EWT is used for the removal of fast temporal scales in multiscale entropy analysis. Empirical mode decomposition is an adaptive data analysis method in the sense that it does not require prior information about the signal statistics and tend to decompose a signal into various constituent modes. The utility of Standard EMD algorithm is however limited to single channel data as it suffers from the problems of mode alignment and mode mixing when applied channel wise for multivariate data. The standard EMD algorithm was extended to multivariate Empirical mode decomposition (MEMD) that can be used analyze a multivariate data. The MEMD can only be applied to multivariate data in which all the channels have equal data length. EWT is another adaptive technique for mode extraction in a signal using empirical scaling and wavelet functions. The multiscale entropy (MSE) algorithm is generally used to quantify the complexity of a time series. The original MSE approach utilizes a coarse-graining process for the removal of fast temporal scales in a time series which is equivalent to applying a finite impulse response (FIR) moving average filter. In Refined Multiscale entropy (RMSE), the FIR filter was replaced with a low pass Butterworth filter which exhibits a better frequency response than that of a FIR filter. In this paper we have presented a new approach for the removal of fast temporal scales based on empirical wavelet transform. The empirical wavelet transform is also used as an innovative filtering approach in multiscale entropy analysis.