Detection of unusual events and trends in complex non-stationary data streams

The search for unusual events and trends hidden in multi-component, nonlinear, non-stationary, noisy signals is extremely important for diverse applications, ranging from power plant operation to homeland security. In the context of this work, we define an unusual event as a local signal disturbance and a trend as a continuous carrier of information added to and different from the underlying baseline dynamics. The goal of this paper is to investigate the feasibility of detecting hidden events inside intermittent signal data sets corrupted by high levels of noise, by using the Hilbert-Huang empirical mode decomposition method.