Statistical hypothesis testing with time-frequency surrogates to check signal stationarity

Abstract : An operational framework is developed for testing stationarity relatively to an observation scale. The proposed method makes use of a family of stationary surrogates for defining the null hypothesis of stationarity. As a further contribution to the field, we demonstrate the strict-sense stationarity of surrogate signals and we exploit this property to derive the asymptotic distributions of their spectrogram and power spectral density. A statistical hypothesis testing framework is then proposed to check signal stationarity. Finally, some results are shown on a typical model of signals that can be thought of as stationary or nonstationary, depending on the observation scale used.