RR interval time series modeling: the PhysioNet/Computers in Cardiology Challenge 2002

Cardiac inter-beat (RR) interval time series contain fluctuations at time scales ranging from a few seconds to many hours. Realistic models of these series are potentially useful to researchers, not only as sources of surrogate data with known properties for evaluating novel analytic methods, but also as sources of insight into the diverse mechanisms underlying heart rate variability. PhysioNet and Computers in Cardiology have sponsored an open on-line competition aimed at stimulating the creation and exchange of high-quality models of RR interval variability, the third in an annual series of challenges for the research community. Participants first created software that was used to generate 24-hour synthetic time series, then attempted to identify the synthetic series within an unlabeled data set that included roughly equal amounts of real and synthetic data. All of the software models and the data used in the challenge are available at http://www.physionet.org/challenge/2002/.