Characterizing complicated behavior from time series constitutes a fundamental problem of continuing interest and it has attracted a great deal of attention from a wide variety of fields on account of its significant importance. We in this paper propose a novel wavelet multiresolution complex network (WMCN) for analyzing multivariate nonlinear time series. In particular, we first employ wavelet multiresolution decomposition to obtain the wavelet coefficients series at different resolutions for each time series. We then infer the complex network by regarding each time series as a node and determining the connections in terms of the distance among the feature vectors extracted from wavelet coefficients series. We apply our method to analyze the multivariate nonlinear time series from our oil–water two-phase flow experiment. We construct various wavelet multiresolution complex networks and use the weighted average clustering coefficient and the weighted average shortest path length to characterize the nonlinear dynamical behavior underlying the derived networks. In addition, we calculate the permutation entropy to support the findings from our network analysis. Our results suggest that our method allows characterizing the nonlinear flow behavior underlying the transitions of oil–water flows.
Wavelet Multiresolution Complex Network for Analyzing Multivariate Nonlinear Time Series