GLOSSARY OF TERMS USED IN TIME SERIES ANALYSIS
OF CARDIOVASCULAR DATA
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WIGNER-VILLE DISTRIBUTION

Time-frequency distribution of a signal with very high time and frequency resolution

The Wigner-Ville distribution of a signal s(t), W(t,f), is defined as:

A valuable property of  the Wigner-Ville distribution is that it satisfies the marginal conditions. For a time-series x(n), the expression of the discrete-time Wigner-Ville distribution, WD(n,f) is:
where hN(k) is a data-window, which performs a frequency smoothing. While Fourier spectra are periodic with period equal to the sampling rate, WD(n,f) is periodic in frequency with period equal to half the sampling rate. This may cause aliasing, which can be removed either by oversampling, or by using the corresponding analytic signal.The distribution is negatively affected by important cross-terms, which limit its practical use. Cross-terms may be adequately reduced smoothing the distribution over time. The resulting smoothed Wigner-Ville, SWD(n,f) is:
The time-resolution depends on the time-window gM(m), and it is lower in SWD than in WD. Moreover, SWD does not satisfy the marginal conditions. To reduce the cross-terms satisfying the marginal conditions, a larger class of time-frequency distributions, the Choi-Williams distribution, which includes the Wigner-Ville as a special case, has been proposed.
A Cross-Wigner Distribution has been also proposed for the time-variant bivariate spectral analysis of nonstationary cardiovascular signals.

References
Novak P., Novak V. (1993) Time/frequency mapping of the heart rate, blood pressure and respiratory signals Med.&.Biol. eng. & Comput.
Novak V et al (1993) Influence of respiration on heart rate and blood pressure fluctuations.J Appl Physiol
Pola S et. al (1996) Estimation of the power spectral density in nonstationary cardiovascular time series: assessing the role of the time-frequency representations (TFR). IEEE Trans Biomed Eng.
Pola S, et al Bivariate Spectral Analysis of Nonstationary Cardiovascular Variability Series through Cross Wigner Distribution Computers in Cardiology 1996, 81-84
Pola S et al (1995) Assessing Variability in Cardiovascular Series during Autonomic Tests. in Computers analysis of Cardiovascular Signals, M Di Rienzo (Ed.), IOS Press, 53-66.
Chan HL et al (2001) Time-Frequency analysis of heart rate variability during transient segments. Ann Biomed Eng.


(PC 25-02-2000)

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