EMD based refined composite multiscale entropy analysis of complex signals

•Trends superimposed in signals greatly affect its complexity measurement.•EMD–RCMSE method gives good complexity measurement of signals with various trends.•Traffic signals are more complex than the results calculated from traditional MSE.

Multiscale entropy (MSE) is an effective method to measure the complexity of signals from complex systems, which has been applied to various fields successfully. However, MSE may yield an inaccurate estimate of entropy and induce undefined entropy as the coarse-graining procedure reduces the length of data considerably at large scales. Refined composite multiscale entropy (RCMSE) is then developed to solve this problem. However, trends superimposed in signals may significantly affect the complexity measurement. Thus we introduce an empirical mode decomposition based RCMSE, called EMD–RCMSE to first eliminate such effects of trends and then measure the complexity of signals. It is validated from simulated signals and has good estimation. In addition, this method is also applied to study the complexity of traffic signals and we obtain some interesting results: (1) Traffic signals are more complex than the results showing from RCMSE/MSE; (2) Weekday and weekend patterns (different combination of trends) greatly affect the results; (3) Complexity indices change with time at each day, due to the degree of human activities.