A time series pre-processing methodology with statistical and spectral analysis for classifying non-stationary stochastic biosignals

Abstract

Biosignal classification is an important non-invasive diagnosis tool in biomedical application, e.g. electrocardiogram (ECG), electroencephalogram (EEG), and electromyogram (EMG) that helps medical experts to automatically classify whether a sample of biosignal under test/monitor belongs to the normal type or otherwise. Most biosignals are stochastic and non-stationary in nature, that means their values are time dependent and their statistics vary over different points of time. However, most classification algorithms in data mining are designed to work with data that possess multiple attributes to capture the non-linear relationships between the values of the attributes to the predicted target class. Therefore, it has been a crucial research topic for transforming univariate time series to multivariate dataset to fit into classification algorithms. For this, we propose a pre-processing methodology called statistical feature extraction (SFX). Using the SFX we can faithfully remodel statistical characteristics of the time series via a sequence of piecewise transform functions. The new methodology is tested through simulation experiments over three representative types of biosignals, namely EEG, ECG and EMG. The experiments yield encouraging results supporting the fact that SFX indeed produces better performance in biosignal classification than traditional analysis techniques like Wavelets and LPC-CC.