Testing for correlation structures in short-term variabilities with long-term trends of multivariate time series.

We describe a method for identifying correlation structures in irregular fluctuations (short-term variabilities) of multivariate time series, even if they exhibit long-term trends. This method is based on the previously proposed small shuffle surrogate method. The null hypothesis addressed by this method is that there is no short-term correlation structure among data or that the irregular fluctuations are independent. The method is demonstrated for numerical data generated by known systems and applied to several experimental time series.