Detecting nonlinear stochastic systems using two independent hypothesis tests.

Various systems in the real world can be nonlinear and stochastic, but because nonlinear time series analysis has been developed to distinguish nonlinear deterministic systems from linear stochastic systems, there have been no appropriate methods developed so far for testing the nonlinear stochasticity for a given system. Thus, here we propose a set of two hypothesis tests, one for the nonlinearity and one for the stochasticity, independent of each other. The test for the linearity is based on Fourier-transform-based surrogate data with a nonlinear test statistic, while the test for determinism depends on the theory of ordinal patterns or permutations recently developed intensively. We demonstrate the proposed set of tests with time series generated from toy models. In addition, we show that both a foreign exchange market and a temperature series in Tokyo could be nonlinear and stochastic, as well as sometimes with determinism beyond pseudoperiodicity.