paper

Understanding the Lomb-Scargle Periodogram

arXiv:1703.09824 · doi:10.3847/1538-4365/aab766

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.

55 pages, 26 figures. Code available at https://github.com/jakevdp/PracticalLombScargle/

References in corpus (7)

Cited by in corpus (474)