Background Mental fatigue is usually caused by long-term cognitive activities, mainly manifested as drowsiness, difficulty in concentrating, decreased alertness, disordered thinking, slow reaction, lethargy, reduced work efficiency, error-prone and so on. Mental fatigue has become a widespread sub-health condition, and has a serious impact on the cognitive function of the brain. However, seldom studies investigate the differences of mental fatigue on electrophysiological activity both in resting state and task state at the same time. Here, twenty healthy male participants were recruited to do a consecutive mental arithmetic tasks for mental fatigue induction, and electroencephalogram (EEG) data were collected before and after each tasks. The power and relative power of five EEG rhythms both in resting state and task state were analyzed statistically. Results The results of brain topographies and statistical analysis indicated that mental arithmetic task can successfully induce mental fatigue in the enrolled subjects. The relative power index was more sensitive than the power index in response to mental fatigue, and the relative power for assessing mental fatigue was better in resting state than in task state. Furthermore, we found that it is of great physiological significance to divide alpha frequency band into alpha1 band and alpha2 band in fatigue related studies, and at the same time improve the statistical differences of sub-bands. Conclusions Our current results suggested that the brain activity in mental fatigue state has great differences in resting state and task state, and it is imperative to select the appropriate state in EEG data acquisition and divide alpha band into alpha1 and alpha2 bands in mental fatigue related researches.

Brain functional network has been widely applied to investigate brain function changes among different conditions and proved to be a small-world-like network. But seldom researches explore the effects of mental fatigue on the small-world brain functional network organization. In the present study, 20 healthy individuals were included to do a consecutive mental arithmetic task to induce mental fatigue, and scalp electroencephalogram (EEG) signals were recorded before and after the task. Correlations between all pairs of EEG channels were determined by mutual information (MI). The resulting adjacency matrices were converted into brain functional networks by applying a threshold, and then, the clustering coefficient (C), characteristic path length (L), and corresponding small-world feature were calculated. Through performing analysis of variance (ANOVA) on the mean MI for every EEG rhythm, only the data of α1 rhythm during the task state were emerged for the further explorations of mental fatigue. For a wide range of thresholds, C increased and L and small-world feature decreased with the deepening mental fatigue. The pattern of the small-world characteristic still existed when computed with a constant degree. Our present findings indicated that more functional connectivities were activated at the mental fatigue stage for efficient information transmission and processing, and mental fatigue can be characterized by a reduced small-world network characteristic. Our results provide a new perspective to understand the neural mechanisms of mental fatigue based on complex network theories.

Mechanical signals are not only disturbed by Gaussian noise, but also by non-Gaussian noise. These Gaussian noise and non-Gaussian noise have gravely impeded detecting of rolling bearing defects using traditional methods. In this context, the paper develops a novel detection method for rolling bearing, which combines bispectrum analysis with an improved ensemble empirical mode decomposition (EEMD). To effectively eliminate Gaussian noise in the signal, bispectrum analysis is adopted. In order to effectively reduce non-Gaussian noise, a cloud model-improved EEMD is proposed, where the cloud model is introduced to restrain the mode mixing phenomenon. Then a rolling bearing defect detection plan based on the proposed method is put forward. From theoretical analysis and experimental verification, it is demonstrated that the proposed method has superior performance in reducing multiple background noise. Furthermore, compared with other three methods, the results show that the proposed method can detect the defect of rolling bearings more effectively. INDEX TERMS Bispectrum analysis, cloud model, defect detection, ensemble empirical mode decomposition, mode mixing, rolling bearing.

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The maximum eigenvalue of the adjacency matrix (AM) has been supposed to contain rich information about the corresponding network. An experimental study focused on revealing the meaning and application of the maximum eigenvalue is missing. To this end, AM was constructed using mutual information (MI) to determine the functional connectivity with electroencephalogram (EEG) data recorded with a mental fatigue model, and then was converted into both binary and weighted brain functional network (BFN) and corresponding random networks (RNs). Both maximum eigenvalue and corresponding network characters in BFNs and RNs were considered to explore the changes during the formation of mental fatigue. The results indicated that large maximum eigenvalue means more edges in the corresponding network, along with a high degree and a short characteristic path length both in weighted and binary BFNs. Interestingly, the maximum eigenvalue of AM was always a little larger than that of the corresponding random matrix (RM), and had an obvious linearity with the sum of the AM elements, indicating that the maximum eigenvalue can be able to distinguish the network structures which have the same mean degree. What is more, the maximum eigenvalue, which increased with the deepening of mental fatigue, can become a good indicator for mental fatigue estimation.

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The solution of a Least Squares Support Vector Machine (LS-SVM) suffers from the problem of nonsparseness. The Forward Least Squares Approximation (FLSA) is a greedy approximation algorithm with a least-squares loss function. This paper proposes a new Support Vector Machine for which the FLSA is the training algorithm—the Forward Least Squares Approximation SVM (FLSA-SVM). A major novelty of this new FLSA-SVM is that the number of support vectors is the regularization parameter for tuning the tradeoff between the generalization ability and the training cost. The FLSA-SVMs can also detect the linear dependencies in vectors of the input Gramian matrix. These attributes together contribute to its extreme sparseness. Experiments on benchmark datasets are presented which show that, compared to various SVM algorithms, the FLSA-SVM is extremely compact, while maintaining a competitive generalization ability.

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