Table 1.

Comparison of methods to determine period in simulated noisy oscillatory time series of various lengths and a sampling rate of 2 samples/h, where the true period is 24.9h. Values in the table are the absolute error averaged over the 100 point estimates for each of the 7 methods.

Length of time series	DFT	MESA	ACS	Peak-to- peak (running average)	Sine-fitting	Peak-to-peak (wavelet)	BPENS
4 cycles	36 min	15 min	23 min	31 min	13 min	7.6 min	5.4 min
8 cycles	28 min	6.2 min	8.4 min	7.1 min	1.7 min	3.3 min	1.7 min
16 cycles	28 min	1.3 min	8.1 min	2.3 min	1.6 min	0.93 min	0.61 min
32 cycles	16 min	0.65 min	6.0 min	2.1 min	0.42 min	0.53 min	0.24 min