Multi-scale Recurrence Quantification Analysis of Heartbeat Interval Series in Healthy vs. Heart Failure Subjects

Recurrence plot is a useful analysis method for nonlinear time series, and has been widely used in studies of heart rate variability in recent years. In this paper, recurrence plot and corresponding quantification analysis were utilized to analyze the heart rate variability data from healthy people and congestive heart failure sufferers. It was found that the measures for standard recurrence quantification analysis failed to distinguish between the two groups. Therefore, a multi-scale recurrence quantification analysis method was proposed, which is able to implement the quantitative analysis for recurrence structures of coarse-grained heartbeat interval series on multiple time scales. Experiment results showed that, on certain time scales, the recurrence structures of abnormal heart rate fluctuation from subjects with congestive heart failure could be reflected more clearly by multi-scale RQA parameters.