Cyclostationary analysis has several applications in communications, e.g., spectral sensing, signal parameter estimation, and modulation classification. Most of them consider the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel model, although wireless communication systems may also be subject to non-Gaussian interference and impulsive noise. In this context, the communication channel can be better modeled by heavy-tailed distributions, such as the non-Gaussian alpha-stable one. Some applications of the cyclostationary approach based on the spatial sign cyclic correlation function (SSCCF), fractional lower-order cyclic autocorrelation function (FLOCAF), and cyclic correntropy function (CCF) demonstrate that these are promising solutions for the analysis of signals in the presence of impulsive non-Gaussian noise. However, the investigation of functions above applied to digital modulation recognition in impulsive environments, and the comparison among them are topics that did not adequately explore yet. This work demonstrates that SSCCF is a particular case of the FLOCAF. Besides, a detailed analysis of the use of the FLOCAF and CCF is presented to obtain cyclostationary descriptors for the recognition of digital modulations BPSK, QPSK, 8-QAM, 16-QAM, and 32-QAM. Automatic modulation classification (AMC) architectures, based on the functions mentioned above, are also proposed. Besides, another contribution showed is that both the FLOCAF and CCF allow the symbol rate parameter estimation. The performances of AMC architectures were evaluated in the scenario with modulated signals contaminated with additive non-Gaussian alpha-stable noise. The results demonstrate that both architectures can classify signals in different contamination scenarios. However, the architecture based on the CCF is more efficient than the FLOCAF-based one.

This paper proposes the use of a similarity measure based on information theory called correntropy for the automatic classification of pathological voices. By using correntropy, it is possible to obtain descriptors that aggregate distinct spectral characteristics for healthy and pathological voices. Experiments using computational simulation demonstrate that such descriptors are very efficient in the characterization of vocal dysfunctions, leading to a success rate of 97% in the classification. With this new architecture, the classification process of vocal pathologies becomes much more simple and efficient.

Recent researches have demonstrated that the Fuzzy Wavelet Neural Networks (FWNNs) are an efficient tool to identify nonlinear systems. In these structures, features related to fuzzy logic, wavelet functions, and neural networks are combined in an architecture similar to the Adaptive Neurofuzzy Inference Systems (ANFIS). In practical applications, the experimental data set used in the identification task often contains unknown noise and outliers, which decrease the FWNN model reliability. In order to reduce the negative effects of these erroneous measurements, this work proposes the direct use of a similarity measure based on information theory in the FWNN learning procedure. The Mean Squared Error (MSE) cost function is replaced by the Maximum Correntropy Criterion (MCC) in the traditional error backpropagation (BP) algorithm. The input-output maps of a real nonlinear system studied in this work are identified from an experimental data set corrupted by different outliers rates and additive white Gaussian noise. The results demonstrate the advantages of the proposed cost function using the MCC as compared to the MSE. This work also investigates the influence of the kernel size on the performance of the MCC in the BP algorithm, since it is the only free parameter of correntropy.