Time-frequency analysis of non-stationary biological signals with sparse linear regression based fourier linear combiner

It is often difficult to analyze biological signals because of their nonlinear and non-stationary characteristics. This necessitates the usage of time-frequency decomposition methods for analyzing the subtle changes in these signals that are often connected to an underlying phenomena. This paper presents a new approach to analyze the time-varying characteristics of such signals by employing a simple truncated Fourier series model, namely the band-limited multiple Fourier linear combiner (BMFLC). In contrast to the earlier designs, we first identified the sparsity imposed on the signal model in order to reformulate the model to a sparse linear regression model. The coefficients of the proposed model are then estimated by a convex optimization algorithm. The performance of the proposed method was analyzed with benchmark test signals. An energy ratio metric is employed to quantify the spectral performance and results show that the proposed method Sparse-BMFLC has high mean energy (0.9976) ratio and outperforms existing methods such as short-time Fourier transfrom (STFT), continuous Wavelet transform (CWT) and BMFLC Kalman Smoother. Furthermore, the proposed method provides an overall 6.22% in reconstruction error.