Understanding the Lomb-Scargle Periodogram
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
2018-05-23 v1
Abstract
The Lomb-Scargle periodogram is a well-known algorithm for detecting and characterizing periodic signals in unevenly-sampled data. This paper presents a conceptual introduction to the Lomb-Scargle periodogram and important practical considerations for its use. Rather than a rigorous mathematical treatment, the goal of this paper is to build intuition about what assumptions are implicit in the use of the Lomb-Scargle periodogram and related estimators of periodicity, so as to motivate important practical considerations required in its proper application and interpretation.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1703.09824,
title = {Understanding the Lomb-Scargle Periodogram},
author = {Jacob T. VanderPlas},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1703.09824},
year = {2018}
}
Comments
55 pages, 26 figures. Code available at https://github.com/jakevdp/PracticalLombScargle/