EMD of Gaussian White Noise: Effects of Signal Length and Sifting Number on the Statistical Properties of Intrinsic Mode Functions

Abstract

This work presents a discussion on the probability density function of Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMFs) provided by the Empirical Mode Decomposition of Gaussian white noise, based on experimental simulations. The influence on the probability density functions of the data length and of the maximum allowed number of iterations is analyzed by means of kernel smoothing density estimations. The obtained results are confirmed by statistical normality tests indicating that the IMFs have non-Gaussian distributions. Our study also indicates that large data length and high number of iterations produce multimodal distributions in all modes.