Local Hölder Regularity-Based Modeling of RR Intervals

We analyze the local regularity of RR traces from ECG through the computation of the so-called Holder exponents. These exponents are at the basis of multifractal analysis, which has been shown to be relevant in the study of RR data. While multifractal analysis yields a global picture of the (statistical) distribution of regularity, we focus here on its time evolution. We show that this evolution is strongly correlated with the signal itself, a feature that seems to have remained unnoticed so far. We use this fact to build realistic synthetic RR traces.