Narrow Results

This work explores the use of the Higuchi fractal dimension (HFD) to characterize the complexity of the Standard and Poor’s (S&P) Index for the period from 1928 to 2023. It is found that the fractal dimension is not constant but exhibits large time fluctuations. In line with adaptive market hypothesis notions, such a feature can be seen as the response of the stock market to a complex and changing environment formed by a diversity of participants and exogenous shocks. The concept of fractal dimension was extended to consider scale dependence and multifractality. It is shown that the fractality dimension approaches an integer value when the time scale increases, which reflects smoother price fluctuation profiles. It was also shown that the multifractal HFD exhibits large fluctuations for scales of weeks, months, and quarters, which can be linked to the seasonal periods of the operation of the stock market. The impact of salient events was also assessed. It was found that the 1987 and 2008 market crashes had the highest effect on the multifractal HFD, suggesting that these events involved multiple factors. Overall, the results in the present work showed that the fractal dimension tools and notions provide a useful and complementary framework for characterizing the behavior of financial indices.

Multiscale entropy (MSE) discloses the intrinsic multiple scales in the complexity of physical and physiological signals, which are usually featured by heavy-tailed distributions. Most of these research results are pure experimental search, till Costa et al. made the first attempt to the theoretical basis of MSE. However, the analysis only supports the Gaussian distribution [Phys. Rev. E71, 021906 (2005)]. In this paper, we present the theoretical basis of MSE under the inverse Gaussian distribution, which is a typical model for physiological, physical and financial data sets. The analysis is applicable to uncorrelated inverse Gaussian process and 1/f noise with the multivariate inverse Gaussian distribution, providing a reliable foundation for potential applications of MSE to explore complex physical and physiological time series.

Considering the effects of time-varying meshing stiffness, time-varying support stiffness, transmission errors, tooth side clearance and bearing clearance, a nonlinear dynamics model of the coupled gear-rotor-bearing transmission system of a new energy vehicle is constructed. Firstly, the fourth-order Runge–Kutta integral method is used to solve the differential equations of the system dynamics, and the time-varying meshing force diagram, time history diagram, phase diagram, FFT spectrum diagram, Poincaré map and bifurcation diagram of the system are obtained to study the influence of the external load excitation frequency on the dynamics characteristics of the system. In addition, the multiscale method is used to analyze the main resonance characteristics of the system and to determine the main resonance stability conditions of the system. The effect of time lag control parameters and external load excitation frequency on the main resonance of the system is analyzed by numerical methods. The results show that the gear-rotor-bearing coupled transmission system of the new energy vehicle has obviously nonlinear characteristics, avoiding the system instability interval reasonable selection of external load excitation frequency, meshing damping, time lag parameters and load fluctuations, which can be used to improve the stability of the transmission system of the new energy vehicle.

Nanopore structure and its multiscale feature significantly affect the shale-gas permeability. This paper employs fractal theory to build a shale-gas permeability model, particularly considering the effects of multiscale flow within a multiscale pore space. Contrary to previous studies which assume a bundle of capillary tubes with equal size, in this research, this model reflects various flow regimes that occur in multiscale pores and takes the measured pore-size distribution into account. The flow regime within different scales is individually determined by the Knudsen number. The gas permeability is an integral value of individual permeabilities contributed from pores of different scales. Through comparing the results of five shale samples, it is confirmed that the gas permeability varies with the pore-size distribution of the samples, even though their intrinsic permeabilities are the same. Due to consideration of multiscale flow, the change of gas permeability with pore pressure becomes more complex. Consequently, it is necessary to cover the effects of multiscale flow while determining shale-gas permeability.

Interface and visualization tools usually provide static representations of biological pathways, which can be a severe limitation: fixed pathway boundaries are used without consensus about the elements that should be included in a particular pathway; one cannot generate new pathways or produce selective views of existing pathways. Also, the tools are not capable of integrating multiple levels that conceptually can be distinguished in biological systems.

We present ReConn, an interface and visualization tool for a flexible analysis of large data at multiple biological levels. ReConn (Reactome Connector) is an open source extension to Cytoscape which allows user friendly interaction with the Reactome database. ReConn can use both predefined Reactome pathways as well as generate new pathways. A pathway can be derived by starting from any given metabolite and existing pathways can be extended by adding related reactions. The tool can also retrieve alternative routes between elements of a biological network. Such an option is potentially applicable in the design and analysis of knockout experiments. ReConn displays information about multiple levels of the system in one view. With these dynamic features ReConn addresses all of the above mentioned limitations of the interface tools.

Geotechnical systems often examine interactions that occur between continuum bodies and granular soils. The systems and interactions can be accurately simulated by using multiscale coupling approaches. The model for the continuum bodies is often constructed into a mesh. The meshing, however, is time consuming for a huge spatial system and if distorted is subject to adjustments. A mesh-free approach can be used to eliminate these drawbacks. In this study, a mesh-free approach for simulating continuum–granular systems is presented. This approach combines element-free Galerkin (EFG) and discrete element (DE) methods to approximate the interactions. The capabilities of the coupled EFG–DE method are validated through its solving two example problems: the cantilever beam–disc system and Cundall’s Nine Disc Test. The proposed approach appears to be an efficient and promising tool to model multiscale, multibody contacting problems.

In this paper, a micro-to-macro multiscale approach with peridynamics is proposed to study metal-ceramic composites. Since the volume fraction varies in the spatial domain, these composites are called spatially tailored materials (STMs). Microstructure uncertainties, including porosity, are considered at the microscale when conducting peridynamic modeling and simulation. The collected dataset is used to train probabilistic machine learning models via Gaussian process regression, which can stochastically predict material properties. The machine learning models play a role in passing the information from the microscale to the macroscale. Then, at the macroscale, peridynamics is employed to study the mechanics of STM structures with various volume fraction distributions.

This work is concerned about multiscale models of compact bone. We focus on the lacuna–canalicular system. The interstitial fluid and the ions in it are regarded as solvent and others are treated as solute. The system has the characteristic of solvation process as well as non-equilibrium dynamics. The differential geometry theory of surfaces is adopted. We use this theory to separate the macroscopic domain of solvent from the microscopic domain of solute. We also use it to couple continuum and discrete descriptions. The energy functionals are constructed and then the variational principle is applied to the energy functionals so as to derive desirable governing equations. We consider both long-range polar interactions and short-range nonpolar interactions. The solution of governing equations leads to the minimization of the total energy.

The magnetic resonance imaging technique is mostly used for visualizing and detecting brain tumor, which requires accurate segmentation of brain MR images into white matter, gray matter, cerebrospinal fluid, necrotic tissue, tumor, and edema. But brain image segmentation is a challenging task because of unknown noise and intensity inhomogeneity in brain MR images. This paper proposed a technique for the segmentation and the detection of a tumor, cystic component and edema in brain MR images using multiscale intuitionistic fuzzy roughness (MSIFR). Application of linear scale-space theory and intuitionistic fuzzy image representation deals with noise and intensity inhomogeneity in brain MR images. Intuitionistic fuzzy roughness calculated at proper scale is used to find optimum valley points for segmentation of brain MR images. The algorithm is applied to the real brain MR images from various hospitals and also to the benchmark set of the synthetic MR images from brainweb. The algorithm segments synthetic brain MR image into three regions, gray matter (GM), white matter (WM) and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and also separates tumor, cystic component and edema accurately in real brain MR images. The results of segmentation of proposed algorithm for synthetic images are compared with nonlocal fuzzy c-means (NLFCM), rough set based algorithms, intervalued possibilistic fuzzy c-means (IPFCM), robust modified Gaussian mixture model with rough set (RMGMMRS) and three algorithms, recursive bias corrected possibilistic fuzzy c-means (RBCPFCM), recursive bias corrected possibilistic neighborhood fuzzy c-means (RBCPNFCM) and recursive bias corrected separately weighted possibilistic neighborhood fuzzy c-means (RBCSPNFCM). The quantitative and qualitative evaluation demonstrates the superiority of the proposed algorithm.

Nowadays, the number of patients with brain tumors is steadily increasing, diagnosis and isolation of the tumor play an important role in the process of treatment and surgery. Due to the high error of manual segmentation of the tumor, algorithms that perform this operation with less error are of great importance. Convolutional neural networks have made great progress in the field of medical imaging. The use of imaging techniques and pattern recognition in the diagnosis and automatic determination of brain tumors by MRI imaging reduces errors, human error and speeds up detection. The artificial convolutional neural network (CNN) has been widely used in the diagnosis of intelligent cancers and has significantly reduced the error rate. Therefore, in this paper, we present a new method using a combination of convolutional and multi-scale artificial neural network that has significantly increased the accuracy of tumor diagnosis. This study presents a multidisciplinary convolution neural network (MCNN) approach to classifying tumors that can be used as an important part of automated diagnosis systems for accurate cancer diagnosis. Based on the MCNN structure, which presents the MRI image to several deep convolutional neural networks of varying sizes and resolutions, the stage of extracting classical hand-made features is avoided. This approach proposes better classification rates than the classical methods. This study uses a multi-scale convolution technique to achieve a detection accuracy of 95/4%, which shows the efficiency of the proposed method.