About: SigSpec

SigSpec (acronym of SIGnificance SPECtrum) is a statistical technique to provide the reliability of periodicities in a measured (noisy and not necessarily equidistant) time series. It relies on the amplitude spectrum obtained by the Discrete Fourier transform (DFT) and assigns a quantity called the spectral significance (frequently abbreviated by “sig”) to each amplitude. This quantity is a logarithmic measure of the probability that the given amplitude level would be seen in white noise, in the sense of a type I error. It represents the answer to the question, “What would be the chance to obtain an amplitude like the measured one or higher, if the analysed time series were random?”