Singular spectrum analysis

In time series analysis, singular spectrum analysis (SSA) is a nonparametric spectral estimation method. It combines elements of classical time series analysis, multivariate statistics, multivariate geometry, dynamical systems and signal processing. Its roots lie in the classical Karhunen (1946)–Loève (1945, 1978) spectral decomposition of time series and random fields and in the Mañé (1981)–Takens (1981) embedding theorem. SSA can be an aid in the decomposition of time series into a sum of components, each having a meaningful interpretation. The name "singular spectrum analysis" relates to the spectrum of eigenvalues in a singular value decomposition of a covariance matrix, and not directly to a frequency domain decomposition. The origins of SSA and, more generally, of subspace-based methods for signal processing, go back to the eighteenth century (Prony's method). A key development was the formulation of the spectral decomposition of the covariance operator of stochastic processes by Kari Karhunen and Michel Loève in the late 1940s (Loève, 1945; Karhunen, 1947). Broomhead and King (1986a, b) and Fraedrich (1986) proposed to use SSA and multichannel SSA (M-SSA) in the context of nonlinear dynamics for the purpose of reconstructing the attractor of a system from measured time series. These authors provided an extension and a more robust application of the idea of reconstructing dynamics from a single time series based on the embedding theorem. Several other authors had already applied simple versions of M-SSA to meteorological and ecological data sets (Colebrook, 1978; Barnett and Hasselmann, 1979; Weare and Nasstrom, 1982). Ghil, Vautard and their colleagues (Vautard and Ghil, 1989; Ghil and Vautard, 1991; Vautard et al., 1992; Ghil et al., 2002) noticed the analogy between the trajectory matrix of Broomhead and King, on the one hand, and the Karhunen–Loeve decomposition (Principal component analysis in the time domain), on the other.