@article{BraunDitlevsenKurthsetal.2010, author = {Braun, Holger and Ditlevsen, Peter D. and Kurths, J{\"u}rgen and Mudelsee, Manfred}, title = {Limitations of red noise in analysing Dansgaard-Oeschger events}, issn = {1814-9324}, doi = {10.5194/cp-6-85-2010}, year = {2010}, abstract = {During the last glacial period, climate records from the North Atlantic region exhibit a pronounced spectral component corresponding to a period of about 1470 years, which has attracted much attention. This spectral peak is closely related to the recurrence pattern of Dansgaard-Oeschger (DO) events. In previous studies a red noise random process, more precisely a first-order autoregressive (AR1) process, was used to evaluate the statistical significance of this peak, with a reported significance of more than 99\%. Here we use a simple mechanistic two-state model of DO events, which itself was derived from a much more sophisticated ocean-atmosphere model of intermediate complexity, to numerically evaluate the spectral properties of random (i.e., solely noise-driven) events. This way we find that the power spectral density of random DO events differs fundamentally from a simple red noise random process. These results question the applicability of linear spectral analysis for estimating the statistical significance of highly non-linear processes such as DO events. More precisely, to enhance our scientific understanding about the trigger of DO events, we must not consider simple "straw men" as, for example, the AR1 random process, but rather test against realistic alternative descriptions.}, language = {en} } @article{HellandGapelyukSuhrbieretal.2010, author = {Helland, Vanessa Carolina Figuera and Gapelyuk, Andrej and Suhrbier, Alexander and Riedl, Maik and Penzel, Thomas and Kurths, J{\"u}rgen and Wessel, Niels}, title = {Investigation of an automatic sleep stage classification by means of multiscorer hypnogram}, issn = {0026-1270}, doi = {10.3414/Me09-02-0052}, year = {2010}, abstract = {Objectives: Scoring sleep visually based on polysomnography is an important but time-consuming element of sleep medicine. Where-as computer software assists human experts in the assignment of sleep stages to polysomnogram epochs, their performance is usually insufficient. This study evaluates the possibility to fully automatize sleep staging considering the reliability of the sleep stages available from human expert sleep scorers. Methods: We obtain features from EEG, ECG and respiratory signals of polysomnograms from ten healthy subjects. Using the sleep stages provided by three human experts, we evaluate the performance of linear discriminant analysis on the entire polysomnogram and:only on epochs where the three experts agree in their-sleep stage scoring. Results: We show that in polysomnogram intervals, to which all three scorers assign the same sleep stage, our algorithm achieves 90\% accuracy. This high rate of agreement with the human experts is accomplished with only a small set of three frequency features from the EEG. We increase-the performance to 93\% by including ECG and respiration features. In contrast, on intervals of ambiguous sleep stage, the sleep stage classification obtained from our algorithm, agrees with the human consensus scorer in approximately 61\%. Conclusions: These findings suggest that machine classification is highly consistent with human sleep staging and that error in the algorithm's assignments is rather a problem of lack of well-defined criteria for human experts to judge certain polysomnogram epochs than an insufficiency of computational procedures}, language = {en} } @article{ItohKurths2010, author = {Itoh, Naoki and Kurths, J{\"u}rgen}, title = {Change-point detection of climate time series by nonparametric method}, issn = {2078-0958}, year = {2010}, abstract = {In one of the data mining techniques, change-point detection is of importance in evaluating time series measured in real world. For decades this technique has been developed as a nonlinear dynamics. We apply the method for detecting the change points, Singular Spectrum Transformation (SST), to the climate time series. To know where the structures of climate data sets change can reveal a climate background. In this paper we discuss the structures of precipitation data in Kenya and Wrangel Island (Arctic land) by using the SST.}, language = {en} }