When conducting an analysis of nature’s time series, such as meteorological ones, an important matter is a long-range dependence to quantify the global behavior of the series and connect it with other physical characteristics of the region of study. In this paper, we applied the Higuchi fractal dimension and the Hurst exponent (rescaled range) to quantify the relative trend underlying the time series of historical data from 17 of the 34 weather stations located in the Río Bravo-San Juan Basin, Mexico; these data were provided by the National Water Commission CONAGUA) in Mexico. In this way, this work aims to perform a comparative study about the level of persistency obtained by using the Higuchi fractal dimension and Hurst exponent for each station of the basin. The comparison is supported by a climate clustering of the stations, according to the Köppen classification. Results showed a better fitting between the climate of each station and its Higuchi fractal dimension obtained than when using the Hurst exponent. In fact, we found that the more the aridity of the zone the more the persistency of rainfall, according to Higuchi’s values. In turn, we found more relation between the Hurst exponent and the accumulated amount of rainfall. These are relations between the climate and the long-term persistency of rainfall in the basin that could help to better understand and complete the climatological models of the study region. Trends between the fractal exponents used and the accumulated annual rainfall were also analyzed.

This paper presents the novel enhanced Wagner–Hagras interval type-3 Takagi–Sugeno–Kang fuzzy logic system with type-1 non-singleton inputs (EWH IT3 TSK NSFLS-1) that uses the backpropagation (BP) algorithm to train the antecedent and consequent parameters. The proposed methodology dynamically changes the parameters of only the alpha-0 level, minimizing some criterion functions as the current information becomes available for each alpha-k level. The novel fuzzy system was applied in two industrial processes and several fuzzy models were used to make comparisons. The experiments demonstrated that the proposed fuzzy system has a superior ability to predict the critical variables of the tested processes with lower prediction errors than those produced by the benchmark fuzzy systems.

Objective. Kinesthetic Motor Imagery (KMI) represents a robust brain paradigm intended for electroencephalography (EEG)-based commands in brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). However, ensuring high accuracy in multi-command execution remains challenging, with data from C3 and C4 electrodes reaching up to 92% accuracy. This paper aims to characterize and classify EEG-based KMI of multilevel muscle contraction without relying on primary motor cortex signals. Approach. A new method based on Hurst exponents is introduced to characterize EEG signals of multilevel KMI of muscle contraction from electrodes placed on the premotor, dorsolateral prefrontal, and inferior parietal cortices. EEG signals were recorded during a hand-grip task at four levels of muscle contraction (0%, 10%, 40%, and 70% of the maximal isometric voluntary contraction). The task was executed under two conditions: first, physically, to train subjects in achieving muscle contraction at each level, followed by mental imagery under the KMI paradigm for each contraction level. EMG signals were recorded in both conditions to correlate muscle contraction execution, whether correct or null accurately. Independent component analysis (ICA) maps EEG signals from the sensor to the source space for preprocessing. For characterization, three algorithms based on Hurst exponents were used: the original (HO), using partitions (HRS), and applying semivariogram (HV). Finally, seven classifiers were used: Bayes network (BN), naive Bayes (NB), support vector machine (SVM), random forest (RF), random tree (RT), multilayer perceptron (MP), and k-nearest neighbors (kNN). Main results. A combination of the three Hurst characterization algorithms produced the highest average accuracy of 96.42% from kNN, followed by MP (92.85%), SVM (92.85%), NB (91.07%), RF (91.07%), BN (91.07%), and RT (80.35%). of 96.42% for kNN. Significance. Results show the feasibility of KMI multilevel muscle contraction detection and, thus, the viability of non-binary EEG-based BCI applications without using signals from the motor cortex.

One of the hallmarks of diabetes is an increased modification of cellular proteins. The most prominent type of modification stems from the reaction of methylglyoxal with arginine and lysine residues, leading to structural and functional impairments of target proteins. For lysine glycation, several algorithms allow a prediction of occurrence; thus, making it possible to pinpoint likely targets. However, according to our knowledge, no approaches have been published for predicting the likelihood of arginine glycation. There are indications that arginine and not lysine is the most prominent target for the toxic dialdehyde. One of the reasons why there is no arginine glycation predictor is the limited availability of quantitative data. Here, we used a recently published high–quality dataset of arginine modification probabilities to employ an artificial neural network strategy. Despite the limited data availability, our results achieve an accuracy of about 75% of correctly predicting the exact value of the glycation probability of an arginine–containing peptide without setting thresholds upon whether it is decided if a given arginine is modified or not. This contribution suggests a solution for predicting arginine glycation of short peptides.

This paper presents (a) a novel hybrid learning method to train interval type-1 non-singleton type-3 fuzzy logic systems (IT3 NSFLS-1), (b) a novel method, named enhanced Wagner–Hagras (EWH) applied to IT3 NSFLS-1 fuzzy systems, which includes the level alpha 0 output to calculate the output $y$ alpha using the average of the outputs $y$ alpha $k$ instead of their weighted average, and (c) the novel application of the proposed methodology to solve the problem of transfer bar surface temperature prediction in a hot strip mill. The development of the proposed methodology uses the orthogonal least square (OLS) method to train the consequent parameters and the backpropagation (BP) method to train the antecedent parameters. This methodology dynamically changes the parameters of only the level alpha 0, minimizing some criterion functions as new information becomes available to each level alpha $k$. The precursor sets are type-2 fuzzy sets, the consequent sets are fuzzy centroids, the inputs are type-1 non-singleton fuzzy numbers with uncertain standard deviations, and the secondary membership functions are modeled as two Gaussians with uncertain standard deviation and the same mean. Based on the firing set of the level alpha 0, the proposed methodology calculates each firing set of each level alpha $k$ to dynamically construct and update the proposed EWH IT3 NSFLS-1 (OLS–BP) system. The proposed enhanced fuzzy system and the proposed hybrid learning algorithm were applied in a hot strip mill facility to predict the transfer bar surface temperature at the finishing mill entry zone using, as inputs, (1) the surface temperature measured by the pyrometer located at the roughing mill exit and (2) the time taken to translate the transfer bar from the exit of the roughing mill to the entry of the descale breaker of the finishing mill. Several fuzzy tools were used to make the benchmarking compositions: type-1 singleton fuzzy logic systems (T1 SFLS), type-1 adaptive network fuzzy inference systems (T1 ANFIS), type-1 radial basis function neural networks (T1 RBFNN), interval singleton type-2 fuzzy logic systems (IT2 SFLS), interval type-1 non-singleton type-2 fuzzy logic systems (IT2 NSFLS-1), type-2 ANFIS (IT2 ANFIS), IT2 RBFNN, general singleton type-2 fuzzy logic systems (GT2 SFLS), general type-1 non-singleton type-2 fuzzy logic systems (GT2 NSFLS-1), interval singleton type-3 fuzzy logic systems (IT3 SFLS), and interval type-1 non-singleton type-3 fuzzy systems (IT3 NSFLS-1). The experiments show that the proposed EWH IT3 NSFLS-1 (OLS–BP) system presented superior capability to learn the knowledge and to predict the surface temperature with the lower prediction error.

Kinesthetic Motor Imagery (MKI) has been demonstrated to be a robust paradigm for Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI). In this paper we present the characterization of KMI paradigm of three tasks of wrist and forearm of the right arm using Hurst exponent and variogram, preceding for ICA to map signals into source space. The results show high persistency an average of 0.76 ± 0.07 for KMI Pronation/Supination (PS), 0.82 ± 0.05 for KMI Flexion-Extension). (FE), and 0.90 ± 0.02 for KMI Abduction-Adduction (AA We found a significant difference between the three KMI tasks, useful for multimodal command in BCI.