Robust Frequency Estimation Using Elemental Sets

Abstract

The extraction of sinusoidal signals from time-series data is a classic problem of ongoing interest in the statistics and signal processing literatures. Obtaining least squares estimates is difficult because the sum of squares has local minima O(1/n) apart in the frequencies. In practice the frequencies are often estimated using ad hoc and inefficient methods. Problems of data quality have received little attention. An elemental set is a subset of the data containing the minimum number of points such that the unknown parameters in the model can be identified. This article shows that, using a variant of the classical method of Prony, parameter estimates for a sum of sinusoids can be obtained ..