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The sudden and apparently unpredictable nature of seizures is one of the most disabling aspects of the disease epilepsy. A method capable of predicting the occurrence of seizures from the electroencephalogram (EEG) of epilepsy patients would open new therapeutic possibilities. Since the 1970s investigations on the predictability of seizures have advanced from preliminary descriptions of seizure precursors to controlled studies applying prediction algorithms to continuous multi-day EEG recordings. While most of the studies published in the 1990s and around the turn of the millennium yielded rather promising results, more recent evaluations could not reproduce these optimistic findings, thus raising a debate about the validity and reliability of previous investigations. In this review, we will critically discuss the literature on seizure prediction and address some of the problems and pitfalls involved in the designing and testing of seizure-prediction algorithms. We will give an account of the current state of this research field, point towards possible future developments and propose methodological guidelines for future studies on seizure prediction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Topologies of real-world complex networks are rarely accessible, but can often be reconstructed from experimentally obtained time series via suitable network reconstruction methods. Extending our earlier work on methods based on statistics of derivative-variable correlations, we here present a new method built on integrating an evolutionary optimization algorithm into the derivative-variable correlation method. Results obtained from our modification of the method in general outperform the original results, demonstrating the suitability of evolutionary optimization logic in network reconstruction problems. We show the method’s usefulness in realistic scenarios where the reconstruction precision can be limited by the nature of the time series. We also discuss important limitations coming from various dynamical regimes that time series can belong to. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]