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Establishing family relationships, such as parentage and sibling relationships, is fundamental in biological research, especially in wild species, as they are often important to understanding evolutionary, ecological, and behavioral processes. [...]

Discrete k-median (DKM) clustering problems arise in many real-life applications that involve time-series L./data sets, in which nondiscrete clustering methods may not represent the problem domain adequately. In this study, [...]

Epilepsy is one of the most common brain disorders, but the dynamical transitions to neurological dysfunctions of epilepsy are not well understood in current neuroscience research. Uncontrolled epilepsy poses a significant burden to society due to associated healthcare cost to treat and control the unpredictable and spontaneous occurrence of seizures. The objective of this study is to develop and present a novel classification technique that is used to classify normal and abnormal (epileptic) brain activities through quantitative analyses of electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings. Such technique is based on the integration of sophisticated approaches from data mining and signal processing research (i.e., chaos theory, k-nearest neighbor, and statistical time series analysis). The proposed technique can correctly classify normal and abnormal EEGs with a sensitivity of 81.29% and a specificity of 72.86 %, on average, across ten patients. Experimental results suggest that the proposed technique can be used to develop abnormal brain activity classification for detecting seizure precursors. Success of this study demonstrates that the proposed technique can excavate hidden patterns/relationships in EEGs and give greater understanding of brain functions from a system perspective, which will advance current diagnosis and treatment of epilepsy. Index Terms--Classification, data mining, dynamic time warping (DTW), electroencephalogram (EEG), epilepsy, nearest neighbor.

Current epileptic seizure 'prediction' algorithms are generally based on the knowledge of seizure occurring time and analyze the electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings retrospectively. It is then obvious that, although these analyses provide evidence of brain activity changes prior to epileptic seizures, they cannot be applied to develop implantable devices for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes. In this paper, we describe an adaptive procedure to prospectively analyze continuous, long-term EEG recordings when only the occurring time of the first seizure is known. The algorithm is based on the convergence and divergence of short-term maximum Lyapunov exponents (STLmax) among critical electrode sites selected adaptively. A warning of an impending seizure is then issued. Global optimization techniques are applied for selecting the critical groups of electrode sites. The adaptive seizure prediction algorithm (ASPA) was tested in continuous 0.76 to 5.84 days intracranial EEG recordings from a group of five patients with refractory temporal lobe epilepsy. A fixed parameter setting applied to all cases predicted 82% of seizures with a false prediction rate of 0.16/h. Seizure warnings occurred an average of 71.7 min before ictal onset. Similar results were produced by dividing the available EEG recordings into half training and testing portions. Optimizing the parameters for individual patients improved sensitivity (84% overall) and reduced false prediction rate (0.12/h overall). These results indicate that ASPA can be applied to implantable devices for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes. Index Terms--Dynamical entrainment, human epilepsy, prediction of seizures, short-term maximum Lyapunov exponents, spatiotemporal transitions.