mse
Multiscale Entropy (Mse) Complexity Index Of The Ibis: The Summed
| Aliases | multiscale_entropy, mse |
| Domain | nonlinear |
| Distribution family | Normal |
| Equation | `` |
| Resource intensity | ◍◍◍◍◌ high, Nonlinear subgraph (template matching / embedding — O(N²) worst case). (measured, see §Resources) |
Definition
Calculate the Multiscale Entropy (MSE) complexity index of the IBIs: the summed.
What does normal look like?
Fitted normative prior: Normal(μ = 5.241, σ = 1.481), KS p = 3.8e-50, n = 59851.

Empirical distribution over the pooled nsrdb+nsr2db normative windows (360-beat windows, 120-beat stride), overlaid with the fitted Normal prior density. Vertical lines mark the median and the 5–95% range.
Normal-range summary (pooled nsrdb+nsr2db)
| statistic | value |
|---|---|
| median | 5.134 |
| IQR (25–75%) | 4.161 – 6.219 |
| 5–95% range | 3.011 – 7.851 |
| mean ± sd | 5.241 ± 1.481 |
| n windows | 59851 |
n varies by feature only through per-window validity over the full pooled nsrdb+nsr2db table (n up to 61 715; e.g. sampen/mse drop windows where the statistic is undefined). ulf is the one exception: a 360-beat (~5 min) window contains no ULF-band power, so it uses a long-window NSRDB-only extraction (see its own page).
Use cases
- Complexity across time scales, separating rich dynamics from white noise.
- Ageing and disease loss-of-complexity studies (Costa et al. 2002).
- Requires longer records for the coarse scales.
Applications by area
Evidence is reported at the measure-family level; a specific variant may not be the exact index measured in every cited study.
Clinical
Coverage: statistics. A pooled literature; reviews or meta-analyses exist.
Genuinely common here: a 2026 PRISMA review found 55 studies (2011–2025) applying fuzzy/Shannon/spectral/SVD/permutation/multiscale entropy, concentrated in diabetes, cardiovascular disease and neurological conditions, with classification accuracies up to 92.5%. The dominant direction is lower entropy/complexity in disease: with one notable reversal (higher multiscale entropy predicted incident stroke in atrial fibrillation).
Dominant reported direction: down: lower entropy/complexity in disease (one AF-stroke reversal).
Key references: (Yang et al., 2026).
Sports & peak performance
Coverage: individual papers. A small, scattered literature with no pooled meta-analysis.
Uncommon: no dedicated meta-analyses exist, and a 2025 systematic review of 19 soccer-overtraining studies found none used any nonlinear/entropy index at all. The handful of small papers that do exist (n = 9–27, sometimes animal models) give mixed directions.
Dominant reported direction: mixed / essentially unstudied.
Key references: (Yang et al., 2026).
Contemplative practice
Coverage: individual papers. A small, scattered literature with no pooled meta-analysis.
One dedicated review (26 studies) covers Shannon/ApEn/SampEn/permutation/Renyi/multiscale entropy in meditation/yoga: most studies report reduced complexity during meditation, but this is not unanimous (some report increases, especially multiscale entropy at long scales), and effect sizes are frequently small/non-significant.
Dominant reported direction: mostly down, with scale- and measure-dependent exceptions.
Key references: (Deka and Deka, 2023).
See the effect-distribution meta-analysis page for the harvested per-study effect sizes/p-values behind these domain summaries (docs/zoo_gen/effect_stats.csv).
Resources
Resource-intensity rank ◍◍◍◍◌ high is measured: median wall-clock time and allocations over a 360-beat window on synthetic realistic RR (docs/zoo_gen/bench_resources.jl; full grid in resource_bench.csv).
| metric (360-beat window) | value |
|---|---|
| cold median wall-time | 3.677 ms |
| warm median wall-time | 3.652 ms |
| allocations (cold) | 11.5 MiB |
Cold = fresh memoization caches (builds every shared representation from scratch); warm = shared representations (diff, periodogram, Poincaré coords, DFA fluctuation) already cached, so only this feature is recomputed. The tier is derived from the cold cost; see Nonlinear subgraph (template matching / embedding — O(N²) worst case).
Citation
Multiscale entropy, Costa, Goldberger & Peng (2002), SampEn across coarse-grained scales.
Seminal reference(s): (Costa et al., 2002).
See the References page for the full bibliography.