Resolving features and derivatives in data with noise

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Mulder, Bert, Lagendijk, Ad, Vos, Willem L.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Mulder, Bert
Lagendijk, Ad
Vos, Willem L.
author_facet Mulder, Bert
Lagendijk, Ad
Vos, Willem L.
contents A frequently occurring challenge in experimental and numerical observation is how to resolve features, such as spectral peaks - with center, width, height - and derivatives from measured data with unavoidable noise. Therefore, we develop a modified Whittaker-Henderson smoothing procedure that balances the spectral features and the noise. In our procedure, we introduce adjustable weights that are optimized using cross-validation. When the measurement errors are known, a straightforward error analysis of the smoothed results is feasible. As an example, we calculate the optical group delay dispersion of a Bragg reflector from synthetic phase data with noise to illustrate the effectiveness of the smoothing algorithm. The smoother faithfully reconstructs the group delay dispersion, allowing to observe details that otherwise remain buried in noise. To further illustrate the power of our smoother, we study several commonly occurring difficulties in data and data analysis and show how to properly smoothen unequally sampled data, how to obtain discontinuities, including discontinuous derivatives or kinks, and how to properly smooth data in the vicinity of boundaries to the domains.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_22077
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Resolving features and derivatives in data with noise
Mulder, Bert
Lagendijk, Ad
Vos, Willem L.
Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability
Optics
A frequently occurring challenge in experimental and numerical observation is how to resolve features, such as spectral peaks - with center, width, height - and derivatives from measured data with unavoidable noise. Therefore, we develop a modified Whittaker-Henderson smoothing procedure that balances the spectral features and the noise. In our procedure, we introduce adjustable weights that are optimized using cross-validation. When the measurement errors are known, a straightforward error analysis of the smoothed results is feasible. As an example, we calculate the optical group delay dispersion of a Bragg reflector from synthetic phase data with noise to illustrate the effectiveness of the smoothing algorithm. The smoother faithfully reconstructs the group delay dispersion, allowing to observe details that otherwise remain buried in noise. To further illustrate the power of our smoother, we study several commonly occurring difficulties in data and data analysis and show how to properly smoothen unequally sampled data, how to obtain discontinuities, including discontinuous derivatives or kinks, and how to properly smooth data in the vicinity of boundaries to the domains.
title Resolving features and derivatives in data with noise
topic Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability
Optics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22077