Computational and Mathematical Methods in Medicine
Volume 2012 (2012), Article ID 291510, 5 pages
http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2012/291510
Research Article

Heavy-Tailed Prediction Error: A Difficulty in Predicting Biomedical Signals of Noise Type

Ming Li,1 Wei Zhao,2 and Biao Chen2

1School of Information Science & Technology, East China Normal University, No. 500, Dong-Chuan Road, Shanghai 200241, China
2Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Macau, Padre Tomas Pereira Avenue, Taipa, Macau

Received 31 October 2012; Accepted 20 November 2012

Academic Editor: Carlo Cattani

Copyright © 2012 Ming Li et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

A fractal signal in biomedical engineering may be characterized by noise, that is, the power spectrum density (PSD) divergences at . According the Taqqu’s law, noise has the properties of long-range dependence and heavy-tailed probability density function (PDF). The contribution of this paper is to exhibit that the prediction error of a biomedical signal of noise type is long-range dependent (LRD). Thus, it is heavy-tailed and of noise. Consequently, the variance of the prediction error is usually large or may not exist, making predicting biomedical signals of noise type difficult.