English

A Fast Chi-squared Technique For Period Search of Irregularly Sampled Data

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability 2009-04-17 v1 Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics

Abstract

A new, computationally- and statistically-efficient algorithm, the Fast χ2\chi^2 algorithm, can find a periodic signal with harmonic content in irregularly-sampled data with non-uniform errors. The algorithm calculates the minimized χ2\chi^2 as a function of frequency at the desired number of harmonics, using Fast Fourier Transforms to provide O(NlogN)O (N \log N) performance. The code for a reference implementation is provided.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0901.1913,
  title  = {A Fast Chi-squared Technique For Period Search of Irregularly Sampled Data},
  author = {David M. Palmer},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0901.1913},
  year   = {2009}
}

Comments

Source code for the reference implementation is available at http://public.lanl.gov/palmer/fastchi.html . Accepted by ApJ. 24 pages, 4 figures