When we have a very noisy signal with a large number of spikes and signal bursts then if all else fails try Median Filtering. This is a technique often used in cleaning up pictures. The operation is almost childishly simple in concept but we will save the details until we have examined an example.
Sometimes data has spikes which are clearly artefacts of the processing or are due to some other external source. One is used to seeing these on time series but in some cases there are unrepresentative “spikes” in the frequency analysed data. Here we discuss how we can use spectrum smoothing to alleviate the problem. An example spectrum is shown below.
In many real-world applications it is impossible to avoid “spikes” or “dropouts” in data that we record. Many people assume that these only cause problems with their data if they become obvious. This is not always the case. Consider the following two time histories.
For various reasons data captured in the real world often contains spikes that will give erroneous results when analysed. The DATS software package provides various ways of editing and to remove spikes from data. Let us consider a real life case history.
