A method for the estimation of the significance of cross-correlations in unevenly sampled red-noise time series

Max-Moerbeck, W.; Richards, J. L.; Hovatta, T.; Pavlidou, V.; Pearson, T. J.; Readhead, A. C. S.

Abstract

We present a practical implementation of a Monte Carlo method to estimate the significance of cross-correlations in unevenly sampled time series of data, whose statistical properties are modelled with a simple power-law power spectral density. This implementation builds on published methods; we introduce a number of improvements in the normalization of the cross-correlation function estimate and a bootstrap method for estimating the significance of the cross-correlations. A closely related matter is the estimation of a model for the light curves, which is critical for the significance estimates. We present a graphical and quantitative demonstration that uses simulations to show how common it is to get high cross-correlations for unrelated light curves with steep power spectral densities. This demonstration highlights the dangers of interpreting them as signs of a physical connection. We show that by using interpolation and the Hanning sampling window function we are able to reduce the effects of red-noise leakage and to recover steep simple power-law power spectral densities. We also introduce the use of a Neyman construction for the estimation of the errors in the power-law index of the power spectral density. This method provides a consistent way to estimate the significance of cross-correlations in unevenly sampled time series of data.

Más información

Título según WOS: ID WOS:000343827700035 Not found in local WOS DB
Título de la Revista: MONTHLY NOTICES OF THE ROYAL ASTRONOMICAL SOCIETY
Volumen: 445
Número: 1
Editorial: OXFORD UNIV PRESS
Fecha de publicación: 2014
Página de inicio: 437
Página final: 459
DOI:

10.1093/mnras/stu1707

Notas: ISI