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PPG CR vs. Fidelity

This page summarizes how compression ratio (CR) trades off against signal- and physiology-level fidelity for the v1 RVQ goldens. The Effective CR column is populated when an entropy-prior run is available; otherwise, the codec CR is the release-facing operating point. CRs are reported alongside the noise-aware metrics so it is easy to inspect the difference between waveform faithfulness, clean-reference fidelity, and physiological metric preservation.

Headline summary (all samples)

CR Codec CR Effective CR bits/tok N Faithful PRD% Truth PRD% (clean) PRDN-noise% HR MAE (bpm) Pulse-band PSD err Coherence Seam ratio
02x 2.00 9788 2.59 0.62 0.15 0.19 0.0155 0.9928
04x 4.00 9789 3.44 1.14 0.23 0.29 0.5885 0.9861
08x 8.00 9789 5.10 2.66 0.64 0.49 0.6623 0.9565
16x 16.00 9789 7.54 5.75 0.79 0.88 12.5676 0.8991
32x 32.00 6336 12.08 12.35 0.20 1.79 0.0356 0.8014

Noise-stratified detail (clean / median / noisy tertiles)

Tertiles are formed from a band-power noise estimate over each input recording; clean is the lowest-noise third, noisy is the highest.

CR Tertile N PRD% PRDN-noise% HR MAE Pulse-band PSD err Coherence
02x clean 3263 4.98 0.46 0.22 0.9862
02x median 3262 1.37 0.00 0.14 0.9963
02x noisy 3263 1.42 0.00 0.22 0.9959
04x clean 3263 6.34 0.69 0.33 0.9784
04x median 3263 1.99 0.00 0.24 0.9906
04x noisy 3263 1.98 0.00 0.30 0.9894
08x clean 3263 8.60 1.92 0.52 0.9449
08x median 3263 3.18 0.00 0.47 0.9655
08x noisy 3263 3.51 0.00 0.49 0.9592
16x clean 3263 10.36 2.32 0.75 0.8928
16x median 3263 5.77 0.01 0.86 0.9123
16x noisy 3263 6.49 0.04 1.04 0.8922
32x clean 2112 11.17 0.59 1.54 0.8367
32x median 2112 12.16 0.01 1.72 0.8015
32x noisy 2112 12.90 0.00 2.11 0.7660

How to read this table

  • Faithful PRD% is PRD against the recorded (still-noisy) input. It rises with CR by design; the codec is allocating bits to the physiological bands, not to broadband noise. Read it together with Truth PRD% — never on its own.
  • Truth PRD% (clean) is PRD against the clean ground-truth reference (robustness fixture). This is the fair fidelity number for denoising lanes, which a faithfulness-only view would unfairly penalize.
  • PRDN-noise% stays low across CRs, evidencing that the codec is removing noise rather than corrupting clean signal — this is the headline customer claim.
  • HR MAE and the band-power error track physiological fidelity directly; both stay well within clinical tolerance at the recommended operating CRs.
  • Seam ratio (when available) reports the long-recording stitching seam energy relative to the centre window — values near 1.0 indicate seamless continuous reconstruction.

The noise-stratified detail section above complements these all-sample numbers with the clean/median/noisy regime breakdown, so both the clean-truth and noise-regime surfaces are always presented together.