Comparison between approximate entropy, correntropy and time reversibility: application to uterine electromyogram signals.

Detection of nonlinearity should be the first step before any analysis of nonlinearity or nonlinear behavior in biological signal. The question is which method should be used in each case and which one can best respect the different characteristics of the signals under investigation. In this paper we compare three methods widely used in nonlinearity detection: approximate entropy, correntropy and time reversibility. The false alarm rates with the numbers of surrogates for the three methods were computed on linear, nonlinear stationary and nonlinear nonstationary signals. The results indicate the superiority of time reversibility over the other methods for detecting linearity and nonlinearity in different signal types. The application of time reversibility on uterine electromyographic signal showed very good performance in classifying pregnancy and labor signals.