Quantitative Comparison of Time Frequency Distribution for Heart Rate Variability Using Performance Measure

Abstract

Heart Rate Variability (HRV) has been proposed as a promising non-invasive method to assess Autonomic Nervous System (ANS). The recent trend of analysing HRV, which is a non-stationary signal is using the Time Frequency (TF) analysis such as Time Frequency Distribution (TFD). However, the use of TFD is different for every application, therefore, comparison of TFD performance needs to be carried out to select the suitable TFD. The comparisons performed by previous studies were limited to visual comparison which is very subjective and could lead to error. Therefore, this paper presents an objective quantitative comparison using performance measure, M to select the suitable TFD that characterises HRV response during an Autonomic Function Test (AFT). The investigated TFDs are the Wigner Ville (WVD), Smoothed Pseudo Wigner Ville (SPWVD), Choi William (CWD), Spectrogram (SP), and recently introduced Modified B-Distribution (MBD). From the results, we conclude that MBD and SPWVD demonstrated the highest value of performance measure M, with p