TY - JOUR A1 - Zhou, Changsong A1 - Kurths, Jürgen T1 - Noise-sustained and controlled synchronization of stirred excitable media by external forcing N2 - Most of the previous studies on constructive effects of noise in spatially extended systems have focused on static media, e.g., of the reaction diffusion type. Because many active chemical or biological processes occur in a fluid environment with mixing, we investigate here the interplay among noise, excitability, mixing and external forcing in excitable media advected by a chaotic flow, in a two-dimensional FitzHugh-Nagumo model described by a set of reaction- advection-diffusion equations. In the absence of external forcing, noise may generate sustained coherent oscillations of the media in a range of noise intensities and stirring rates. We find that these noise-sustained oscillations can be synchronized by external periodic signals much smaller than the threshold. Analysis of the locking regions in the parameter space of the signal period, stirring rate and noise intensity reveals that the mechanism underlying the synchronization behaviour is a matching between the time scales of the forcing signal and the noise-sustained oscillations. The results demonstrate that, in the presence of a suitable level of noise, the stirred excitable media act as self-sustained oscillatory systems and become much easier to be entrained by weak external forcing. Our results may be verified in experiments and are useful to understand the synchronization of population dynamics of oceanic ecological systems by annual cycles Y1 - 2005 SN - 1367-2630 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Baptista, Murilo da Silva A1 - Pereira, Tiago A1 - Sartorelli, J. C. A1 - Caldas, Ibere Luiz A1 - Kurths, Jürgen T1 - Non-transitive maps in phase synchronization N2 - Concepts from Ergodic Theory are used to describe the existence of special non-transitive maps in attractors of phase synchronous chaotic oscillators. In particular, it is shown that, for a class of phase-coherent oscillators, these special maps imply phase synchronization. We illustrate these ideas in the sinusoidally forced Chua's circuit and two coupled Rossler oscillators. Furthermore, these results are extended to other coupled chaotic systems. In addition, a phase for a chaotic attractor is defined from the tangent vector of the flow. Finally, it is discussed how these maps can be used for the real-time detection of phase synchronization in experimental systems. (c) 2005 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved Y1 - 2005 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Marwan, Norbert A1 - Kurths, Jürgen T1 - Nonlinear analysis of bivariate data with cross recurrence plots N2 - We use the extension of the method of recurrence plots to cross recurrence plots (CRP) which enables a nonlinear analysis of bivariate data. To quantify CRPs, we develop further three measures of complexity mainly basing on diagonal structures in CRPs. The CRP analysis of prototypical model systems with nonlinear interactions demonstrates that this technique enables to find these nonlinear interrelations from bivariate time series, whereas linear correlation tests do not. Applying the CRP analysis to climatological data, we find a complex relationship between rainfall and El Nino data. Y1 - 2001 UR - http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0201061 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Wessel, Niels A1 - Voss, Andreas A1 - Malberg, Hagen A1 - Ziehmann, Christine A1 - Voss, Henning U. A1 - Schirdewan, Alexander A1 - Meyerfeldt, Udo A1 - Kurths, Jürgen T1 - Nonlinear analysis of complex phenomena in cardiological data N2 - The main intention of this contribution is to discuss different nonlinear approaches to heart rate and blood pressure variability analysis for a better understanding of the cardiovascular regulation. We investigate measures of complexity which are based on symbolic dynamics, renormalised entropy and the finite time growth rates. The dual sequence method to estimate the baroreflex sensitivity and the maximal correlation method to estimate the nonlinear coupling between time series are employed for analysing bivariate data. The latter appears to be a suitable method to estimate the strength of the nonlinear coupling and the coupling direction. Heart rate and blood pressure data from clinical pilot studies and from very large clinical studies are analysed. We demonstrate that parameters from nonlinear dynamics are useful for risk stratification after myocardial infarction, for the prediction of life-threatening cardiac events even in short time series, and for modelling the relationship between heart rate and blood pressure regulation. These findings could be of importance for clinical diagnostics, in algorithms for risk stratification, and for therapeutic and preventive tools of next generation implantable cardioverter defibrillators. Y1 - 2000 ER - TY - BOOK A1 - Kurths, Jürgen A1 - Mayer-Kress, Gottfried ED - Kantz, Holger T1 - Nonlinear analysis of physiological data Y1 - 1998 SN - 3-540-63481-9 PB - Springer CY - Berlin, New York ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Donges, Jonathan A1 - Donner, Reik Volker A1 - Trauth, Martin H. A1 - Marwan, Norbert A1 - Schellnhuber, Hans Joachim A1 - Kurths, Jürgen T1 - Nonlinear detection of paleoclimate-variability transitions possibly related to human evolution JF - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America N2 - Potential paleoclimatic driving mechanisms acting on human evolution present an open problem of cross-disciplinary scientific interest. The analysis of paleoclimate archives encoding the environmental variability in East Africa during the past 5 Ma has triggered an ongoing debate about possible candidate processes and evolutionary mechanisms. In this work, we apply a nonlinear statistical technique, recurrence network analysis, to three distinct marine records of terrigenous dust flux. Our method enables us to identify three epochs with transitions between qualitatively different types of environmental variability in North and East Africa during the (i) Middle Pliocene (3.35-3.15 Ma B. P.), (ii) Early Pleistocene (2.25-1.6 Ma B. P.), and (iii) Middle Pleistocene (1.1-0.7 Ma B. P.). A deeper examination of these transition periods reveals potential climatic drivers, including (i) large-scale changes in ocean currents due to a spatial shift of the Indonesian throughflow in combination with an intensification of Northern Hemisphere glaciation, (ii) a global reorganization of the atmospheric Walker circulation induced in the tropical Pacific and Indian Ocean, and (iii) shifts in the dominating temporal variability pattern of glacial activity during the Middle Pleistocene, respectively. A reexamination of the available fossil record demonstrates statistically significant coincidences between the detected transition periods and major steps in hominin evolution. This result suggests that the observed shifts between more regular and more erratic environmental variability may have acted as a trigger for rapid change in the development of humankind in Africa. KW - African climate KW - Plio-Pleistocene KW - climate-driven evolution KW - dynamical transitions KW - nonlinear time series analysis Y1 - 2011 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1117052108 SN - 0027-8424 VL - 108 IS - 51 SP - 20422 EP - 20427 PB - National Acad. of Sciences CY - Washington ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Gamez, A. J. A1 - Zhou, Changsong A1 - Timmermann, A. A1 - Kurths, Jürgen T1 - Nonlinear dimensionality reduction in climate data N2 - Linear methods of dimensionality reduction are useful tools for handling and interpreting high dimensional data. However, the cumulative variance explained by each of the subspaces in which the data space is decomposed may show a slow convergence that makes the selection of a proper minimum number of subspaces for successfully representing the variability of the process ambiguous. The use of nonlinear methods can improve the embedding of multivariate data into lower dimensional manifolds. In this article, a nonlinear method for dimensionality reduction, Isomap, is applied to the sea surface temperature and thermocline data in the tropical Pacific Ocean, where the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon and the annual cycle phenomena interact. Isomap gives a more accurate description of the manifold dimensionality of the physical system. The knowledge of the minimum number of dimensions is expected to improve the development of low dimensional models for understanding and predicting ENSO Y1 - 2004 SN - 1023-5809 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Voss, Henning U. A1 - Timmer, Jens A1 - Kurths, Jürgen T1 - Nonlinear dynamical system identification from uncertain and indirect measurements N2 - We review the problem of estimating parameters and unobserved trajectory components from noisy time series measurements of continuous nonlinear dynamical systems. It is first shown that in parameter estimation techniques that do not take the measurement errors explicitly into account, like regression approaches, noisy measurements can produce inaccurate parameter estimates. Another problem is that for chaotic systems the cost functions that have to be minimized to estimate states and parameters are so complex that common optimization routines may fail. We show that the inclusion of information about the time-continuous nature of the underlying trajectories can improve parameter estimation considerably. Two approaches, which take into account both the errors-in-variables problem and the problem of complex cost functions, are described in detail: shooting approaches and recursive estimation techniques. Both are demonstrated on numerical examples Y1 - 2004 SN - 0218-1274 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Wessel, Niels A1 - Kleiner, H. J. A1 - Voss, Andreas A1 - Kurths, Jürgen A1 - Dietz, R. T1 - Nonlinear dynamics in cardiovasscular diseases Y1 - 1997 ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Scheffczyk, Christian A1 - Engbert, Ralf A1 - Krampe, Ralf-Thomas A1 - Kurths, Jürgen A1 - Rosenblum, Michael A1 - Zaikin, Alexei A. T1 - Nonlinear Modelling of Polyrhythmic Hand Movements Y1 - 1996 ER -