Eur. Phys. J. Special Topics 222, 457-472 (2013)
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjst/e2013-01852-9

Regular Article

Applications to Real World Time Series Event detection, multimodality and non-stationarity: Ordinal patterns, a tool to rule them all?

¹ Grupo de Neurocomputación Biológica, Escuela Politécnica Superior, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 28049 Madrid, Spain
² Centro de Investigación Operativa, Universidad Miguel Hernández, Avda. de la Universidad s/n, 03202 Elche, Spain

^a e-mail: david.arroyo@uam.es

Received: 27 March 2013
Revised: 25 April 2013
Published online: 25 June 2013

Abstract

In this work, we apply ordinal analysis of time series to the characterisation of neuronal activity. Automatic event detection is performed by means of the so-called permutation entropy, along with the quantification of the relative cardinality of forbidden patterns. In addition, multivariate time series are characterised using the joint permutation entropy. In order to illustrate the suitability of the ordinal analysis for characterising neurophysiological data, we have compared the measures based on ordinal patterns of time series to the tools typically used in the context of neurophysiology.