ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Netw. Physiol.
Sec. Networks in Sleep and Circadian Systems
Robust Information Transfer Calculation Reveals Dynamic Networks during Sleep Arousal
Technical University Dresden, Dresden, Germany
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Abstract
Understanding the influence of cardiovascular diseases (CVD) on the human regulatory func-tions is a major challenge in modern healthcare. This study explores whether the autonomic response to sleep arousals can serve as a diagnostic marker into the health of physiological networks. We introduce a novel method for the robust calculation of information transfer, based on an optimization of the embedding parameters for transfer entropy (TE) calculation. Using this approach, we analyzed the information transfer dynamics of 8,136 sleep arousals from 1,956 subjects of the SHHS follow-up visit. Compared to three state-of-the-art approaches our newly introduced method max. TE, achieved a 17.9% more stable TE estimate compared to the second-best approach. Our results show a significantly (p < 0.001) lower TE in patients with CVD (85.4 ± 0.8 mnats) compared to healthy controls (87.9 ± 0.5 mnats), indicating an impairment of regulatory control mechanisms. Furthermore, the TE decreases linearly with increasing age and shows significant differences between sleep stages, with the highest TE occurring during REM sleep (p < 0.001). These findings demonstrate that sleep arousals, as a physiological stimulus, can reveal sleep stage- and disease-related changes in cardiovascular networks, and that our approach provides a robust group-level embedding strategy for physiological information-transfer analysis.
Summary
Keywords
autonomic regulation, cardiovascular disease, Heart rate variability, information dynamics, Physiological networks, Sleep arousals, Sleep Heart Health Study, transfer entropy
Received
07 July 2026
Accepted
11 August 2026
Copyright
© 2026 Hohmuth, Mueller, Malberg and Schmidt. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: Richard Hohmuth
Disclaimer
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