Heart rate variability (HRV) is a vital measure of the autonomic nervous system functionality and a key indicator of cardiovascular condition. This paper proposes a novel method, called pattern tree which is an extension of Willem's context tree to real-valued data, to investigate HRV via an atypicality framework. In a previous paper atypicality was developed as method for mining and discovery in "Big Data," which requires a universal approach. Using the proposed pattern tree as a universal source coder in this framework led to discovery of arrhythmias and unknown patterns in HRV Holter Monitoring.
This paper presents a novel signal compression algorithm based on the Blaschke unwinding adaptive Fourier decomposition (AFD). The Blaschke unwinding AFD is a newly developed signal decomposition theory. It utilizes the Nevanlinna factorization and the maximal selection principle in each decomposition step, and achieves a faster convergence rate with higher fidelity. The proposed compression algorithm is applied to the electrocardiogram signal. To assess the performance of the proposed compression algorithm, in addition to the generic assessment criteria, we consider the less discussed criteria related to the clinical needs -- for the heart rate variability analysis purpose, how accurate the R peak information is preserved is evaluated. The experiments are conducted on the MIT-BIH arrhythmia benchmark database. The results show that the proposed algorithm performs better than other state-of-the-art approaches. Meanwhile, it also well preserves the R peak information.