| Title | Gaussian mixture model of heart rate variability. | ||
| Author | Costa, Tommaso; Boccignone, Giuseppe; Ferraro, Mario | ||
| Journal | PLoS One | Publication Year/Month | 2012 |
| PMID | 22666386 | PMCID | PMC3364278 |
| Affiliation | 1.Dipartimento di Psicologia, Universita di Torino, Torino, Italy. tommaso.costa@unito.it. | ||
Heart rate variability (HRV) is an important measure of sympathetic and parasympathetic functions of the autonomic nervous system and a key indicator of cardiovascular condition. This paper proposes a novel method to investigate HRV, namely by modelling it as a linear combination of Gaussians. Results show that three Gaussians are enough to describe the stationary statistics of heart variability and to provide a straightforward interpretation of the HRV power spectrum. Comparisons have been made also with synthetic data generated from different physiologically based models showing the plausibility of the Gaussian mixture parameters.