Chaotic SVD method for minimizing the effect of exponential trends in detrended fluctuation analysis

The Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (DFA) and its extensions (MF-DFA) have been used extensively to determine possible long-range correlations in self-affine signals. However, recent studies have reported the susceptibility of DFA to trends which give rise to spurious crossovers and prevent reliable estimation of the scaling exponents. In this study, a smoothing algorithm based on the Chaotic Singular-Value Decomposition (CSVD) is proposed to minimize the effect of exponential trends and distortion in the log-log plots obtained by DFA techniques. The effectiveness of the technique is demonstrated on monofractal and multifractal data corrupted with exponential trends.