Beyond Benford's Law: Distinguishing Noise from Chaos

RESEARCH ARTICLE Beyond Benford's Law: Distinguishing Noise from Chaos Qinglei Li1, Zuntao Fu1*, Naiming Yuan1,2* 1 Laboratory for Climate and Ocean-Atmosphere Studies, Dept. of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, School of Physics, Peking University, Beijing, China, 2 Department of Geography, Climatology, Climate Dynamics, and Climate Change, Justus-Liebig University Giessen, Giessen, Germany * (ZTF); (NMY) Abstract OPEN ACCESS Determinism and randomness are two inherent aspects of all physical processes. Time series from chaotic systems share several features identical with those generated from stochastic processes, which makes them almost undistinguishable. In this paper, a new method based on Benford's law is designed in order to distinguish noise from chaos by only information from the first digit of considered series. By applying this method to discrete data, we confirm that chaotic data indeed can be distinguished from noise data, quantitatively and clearly. Citation: Li Q, Fu Z, Yuan N (2015) Beyond Benford's Law: Distinguishing Noise from Chaos. PLoS ONE 10(6): e0129161. doi:10.1371/journal. pone.0129161 Academic Editor: Francois G. Schmitt, CNRS, FRANCE Received: January 5, 2015 Accepted: May 5, 2015 Published: June 1, 2015 Copyright: © 2015 Li et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files. Funding: This work was supported by the National Science Foundation of China under grant no. 41175141, and 41475048. The funder had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Introduction Time series from chaotic systems (CSs) share with those from stochastic processes (SPs) some properties make them almost undistinguishable. Though behind the veil of apparent randomness, many series from CSs are highly ordered [1–3], the distinction between chaotic and stochastic processes is still a long-standing challenge [4–18]. Moreover, experimental chaotic records are unavoidably contaminated with noise, which makes the distinction task even more complicated. The discrimination between chaotic and stochastic processes has drawn much attention, since irregular and apparently unpredictable behaviors are often observed in natural measurements. Many studies have been done aim to uncover the cause of unpredictability governing these systems, and much effort has been further devoted in understanding this topic [4–18]. First of all, exponential power-spectra have been identified in many idealized nonlinear systems, and are taken to be characteristics of low-dimensional chaos to differentiate chaos from stochastic processes, whose power-spectra show power-law behavior [4–7]. Nonlinear forecasting [8,9] has also been applied to make tentative distinctions between dynamical chaos and measurement errors, since the accuracy of nonlinear forecast diminishes with increasing prediction time intervals for chaotic series, but for stochastic series, it does not. Recently, network and symbolic dynamics related methods [10–18] are used to handle this issue, where structural information among consecutive points in physical or phase space are used to characterize and distinguish stochastic from chaotic processes. PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0129161 June 1, 2015 1 / 11 Distinguishing Noise from Chaos Although above mentioned methods have been successfully applied to distinguish stochastic from chaotic processes, the authors of each method have only explored the related magnitude or permutation information of the analyzed processes, such as power-spectrum method or network based methods. We note that digital information has never been used so far to characterize and further distinguish stochastic from chaotic processes. Actually, digital information is of great importance to characterize specific process. For example, the first digits in many datasets are not uniformly distributed as expected, but heavily skewed toward the smaller digits. This phenomenon was first found by Simon Newcomb in 1881 [19]. Nobody showed interests in this discovery, until 1938 when Frank Albert Benford [20] investigated some 20 tables of 20229 numbers and drawn the conclusion that the first digit probability distribution in many data sets is PB ðdÞ ¼ log10 ð1 þ 1=dÞ ð1Þ where d = 1,2,. . .,9 is the first digit. It was named as Benford's Law (BL) later by the scientific community. Many scientists in different fields have tried to explain the underlying reasons for BL [20–26], but a successful explanation remains elusive [27,28]. However. although there is no accepted interpretation, BL is nearly taken as an universal law. In recent years, most BL related studies are limited in validating whether particular datasets follow this law [29,30], detecting frauds in election and accounting [31,32], as well as testing physical system transition [33,34]. Especially, Tolle and his coauthors [35] examined three low-dimensional chaotic models of dynamical systems, and found examples of either compliance with or deviance from Benford's law, which depends upon the models and the parameters. Can Benford's law be explored to characterize and distinguish stochastic from chaotic processes? The answer from the Toll's results is no. However, the observed dynamics may be strongly affected by the resolution scales used to document the behaviors of considered processes [36]. In order to characterize complex multi-scaled series, it is of fundamental importance to incorporate the multiple scale in devising measures [36]. Costa et al [37]. and Zunino et al. [13] have introduced multi-scale entropy (MSE) and multi-scale permutation entropy (MPE) to successfully distinguish different states of analyzed processes or dynamical systems, respectively. These results show the importance of multi-scale in characterizing the analyzed processes or systems. Here for the first time we introduce the multi-scale to Benford's law analysis, and the results show that it does help us in distinguishing chaos from noise. Materials and Methods Generating SPs We generate three kinds of well-known stochastic processes by Fourier transform technique: (1) Noise with f -k power spectra, (2) Fractional Gaussian noise (FGN) and (3) Fractional Brownian motion (FBM). All three SPs are a particular class of colored noise which represent stochastic (infinite-dimensional) systems with different power-law spectra [13,14]. Noise with f -k power spectra 1. Generate a set {ui,i = 1,2,. . .,N} of independent Gaussian variables of zero mean and variance one, and compute the discrete Fourier transform of the sequence f^u 1k g. 2. Cor (...truncated)