title: Emphasizing difficulties in the detection of rhythms with Lomb-Scargle periodograms.
abstract: The Lomb-Scargle periodogram was introduced in astrophysics to detect sinusoidal signals in noisy unevenly sampled time series. It proved to be a powerful tool in time series analysis and has recently been adapted in biomedical sciences. Its use is motivated by handling non-uniform data which is a common characteristic due to the restricted and irregular observations of, for instance, free-living animals. However, the observational data often contain fractions of non-Gaussian noise or may consist of periodic signals with non-sinusoidal shapes. These properties can make more difficult the interpretation of Lomb-Scargle periodograms and can lead to misleading estimates. In this letter we illustrate these difficulties for noise-free bimodal rhythms and sinusoidal signals with outliers. The examples are aimed to emphasize limitations and to complement the recent discussion on Lomb-Scargle periodograms.
authors.affiliation: Department of Geophysics, University of Sao Paulo, Brazil. martin@iag.usp.br
authors.forename: M
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Schimmel
mesh_terms: D002940:Circadian Rhythm; D003627:Data Interpretation, Statistical; D016018:Least-Squares Analysis; D010507:Periodicity