Heart rate variability (HRV) contains important information about the modulation of the cardiovascular system. Various methods of nonlinear dynamics (e.g., estimating Lyapunov exponents) and complexity measures (e.g., correlation dimension or entropies) have been applied to HRV analysis. Permutation entropy, which was proposed recently, has been widely used in many fields due to its conceptual and computational simplicity. It maps a time series onto a symbolic sequence of permutation ranks. The original permutation entropy assumes the time series under study has a continuous distribution, thus equal values are rare and can be ignored by ranking them according to their order of emergence, or broken by adding small random perturbations to ensure every symbol in a sequence is different. However, when the observed time series is digitized with lower resolution leading to a greater number of equal values, or the equalities represent certain characteristic sequential patterns of the system, it may not be rational to simply ignore or break them. In the present paper, a modified permutation entropy is proposed that, by mapping the equal value onto the same symbol (rank), allows for a more accurate characterization of system states. The application of the modified permutation entropy to the analysis of HRV is investigated using clinically collected data. Results show that modified permutation entropy can greatly improve the ability to distinguish the HRV signals under different physiological and pathological conditions. It can characterize the complexity of HRV more effectively than the original permutation entropy.

• Received 31 January 2011

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevE.85.021906