Assessing Transfer Entropy in cardiovascular and respiratory time series under long-range correlations.

Heart Period (H) results from the activity of several coexisting control mechanisms, involving Systolic Arterial Pressure (S) and Respiration (R), which operate across multiple time scales encompassing not only short-term dynamics but also long-range correlations. In this work, multiscale representation of Transfer Entropy (TE) and of its decomposition in the network of these three interacting processes is obtained by extending the multivariate approach based on linear parametric VAR models to the Vector AutoRegressive Fractionally Integrated (VARFI) framework for Gaussian processes. This approach allows to dissect the different contributions to cardiac dynamics accounting for the simultaneous presence of short and long term dynamics.

Multivariate and Multiscale Complexity of Long-Range Correlated Cardiovascular and Respiratory Variability Series.

Assessing the dynamical complexity of biological time series represents an important topic with potential applications ranging from the characterization of physiological states and pathological conditions to the calculation of diagnostic parameters. In particular, cardiovascular time series exhibit a variability produced by different physiological control mechanisms coupled with each other, which take into account several variables and operate across multiple time scales that result in the coexistence of short term dynamics and long-range correlations. The most widely employed technique to evaluate the dynamical complexity of a time series at different time scales, the so-called multiscale entropy (MSE), has been proven to be unsuitable in the presence of short multivariate time series to be analyzed at long time scales.