Spatial transformation of an irregularly sampled data series to a regularly sampled data series is a challenging problem in many areas such as seismology. The discrete Fourier analysis is limited to regularly sampled data series. On the other hand, the least-squares spectral analysis (LSSA) can analyze an irregularly sampled data series. Although the LSSA method takes into account the correlation among the sinusoidal basis functions of irregularly spaced series, it still suffers from the problem of spectral leakage: Energy leaks from one spectral peak into another. We have developed an iterative method called antileakage LSSA to attenuate the spectral leakage and consequently regularize irregular data series. In this method, we first search for a spectral peak with the highest energy, and then we remove (suppress) it from the original data series. In the next step, we search for a new peak with the highest energy in the residual data series and remove the new and the old components simultaneously from the original data series using a least-squares method. We repeat this procedure until all significant spectral peaks are estimated and removed simultaneously from the original data series. In addition, we address another problem, which is random noise attenuation in the data series, by applying a certain confidence level for significant peaks in the spectrum. We determine the robustness of our method on irregularly sampled synthetic and real data sets, and we compare the results with the antileakage Fourier transform and arbitrary sampled Fourier transform.
SparSpec: a new method for fitting multiple sinusoids with irregularly sampled data
