Data Preprocessing

Successful reconstruction of a shadow attractor provides preliminary empirical evidence that a signal isolated from observed time series data may be generated by deterministic dynamics. However, because we cannot reasonably expect signal processing to purge the signal of all noise in practice, and because noisy linear behavior can be visually indistinguishable from nonlinear behavior, the possibility remains that noticeable regularity detected in a shadow attractor may be fortuitously reconstructed from data generated by a linear-stochastic process. This chapter investigates how we can test this null hypothesis using surrogate data testing. The combination of a noticeably regular shadow attractor, along with strong statistical rejection of fortuitous regularity, increases the probability that observed data are generated by deterministic real-world dynamics.