Dependency Structures in Differentially Coded Cardiovascular Time Series

Objectives. This paper analyses temporal dependency in the time series recorded from aging rats, the healthy ones and those with early developed hypertension. The aim is to explore effects of age and hypertension on mutual sample relationship along the time axis. Methods. A copula methodis applied to raw and to differentially coded signals. The latter ones were additionally binary encoded for a joint conditional entropy application. The signals were recorded from freely moving male Wistar rats and from spontaneous hypertensive rats, aged 3 months and 12 months. Results. The highest level of comonotonic behavior of pulse interval with respect to systolic blood pressure is observed at time lags tau = 0, 3, and 4, while a strong counter-monotonic behavior occurs at time lags tau = 1 and 2. Conclusion. Dynamic range of aging rats is considerably reduced in hypertensive groups. Conditional entropy of systolic blood pressure signal, compared to unconditional, shows an increased level of discrepancy, except for a time lag 1, where the equality is preserved in spite of the memory of differential coder. The antiparallel streams play an important role at single beat time lag.