Spring Seminar Series - February 28, 2005
University of Minnesota
School of Statistics
College of Liberal Arts

Analysis of Non-Stationary Time Series: An Overview of the SLEX Methods

Hernando Ombao
Department of Statistics
University of Illinois

Monday, February 28, 2005
3:30 PM, 115 Ford Hall
Minneapolis, East Bank Campus
Social at 3:00 PM, 300 Ford Hall

Abstract

Many biological and physical signals are non-stationary in nature. For example, brain waves recorded during an epileptic seizure have waveforms whose amplitude (variance) and oscillatory behavior (spectral distribution) change over time. This talk will address some of the interesting statistical problems in signal processing, namely, (i.) representation of non-stationary signals and spectral estimation, (ii.) dimension reduction for massive multivariate non-stationary signals and (iii.) feature extraction and selection for classification and discrimination.

I will present an overview of a coherent and unified body of statistical methods that are based on the SLEX (smooth localized complex exponentials) library. The SLEX are time-localized Fourier waveforms with multi-resolution support. The SLEX library provides a systematic and efficient way of extracting transient spectral and cross-spectral features. In addition, the SLEX methods are able to handle massive data sets because they utilize computationally efficient algorithms. As a matter of practical importance, the SLEX methods give results that are easy to understand because they are time-dependent analogues of the classical Fourier methods for stationary signals. Finally, under the SLEX models, we develop theoretical results of consistency for spectral estimation and classification.

The SLEX methods will be illustrated brain waves, fMRI time series, a speech signal and seismic waves. This talk will conclude with open and challenging problems in signal analysis and the potential of SLEX in addressing these.