Detection of Periodicity Based on Independence Tests - II. Improved Serial Independence Measure

TL;DR

This paper enhances a periodicity detection method by replacing the Hoeffding-test with the Blum-Kiefer-Rosenblatt test, significantly improving detection accuracy, especially for short time series, with applications in astronomy such as star and exoplanet detection.

Contribution

The paper introduces an improved periodicity metric using the BKR test, outperforming previous Hoeffding-test-based methods, particularly for short and sawtooth-shaped time series.

Findings

Superior performance on short time series

Enhanced detection of astronomical objects

Effective in sparse photometric data

Abstract

We introduce an improvement to a periodicity metric we have introduced in a previous paper.We improve on the Hoeffding-test periodicity metric, using the Blum-Kiefer-Rosenblatt (BKR) test. Besides a consistent improvement over the Hoeffding-test approach, the BKR approach turns out to perform superbly when applied to very short time series of sawtoothlike shapes. The expected astronomical implications are much more detections of RR-Lyrae stars and Cepheids in sparse photometric databases, and of eccentric Keplerian radial-velocity (RV) curves, such as those of exoplanets in RV surveys.