Result files

The file result.dat contains a list of all identified sig maxima. This file consists of seven columns providing

1. frequency [inverse time units],
2. sig,
3. amplitude [units of observable],
4. phase [rad],
5. rms scatter of the time series before prewhitening,
6. point-to-point scatter of the time series before prewhitening,
7. the cumulative sig for all frequency components detected so far.

Columns 3 and 4 represent amplitude and phase as the result of a least-squares fit to the time series at the present prewhitening stage (i.e. after subtraction of all previously identified signal components) for the frequency of maximum significance.

The last line in the file contains zeroes for frequency, amplitude, and phase. The non-zero values refer to the (cumulative) sig of the most significant component below the threshold, and to the rms and point-to-point scatter after the last prewhitening step, respectively. This final line is suppressed if the criterion iterations is responsible for program termination.

If the keyword results is provided in the .ini file, additional result files r#iteration#.dat are generated, where the index #iteration# starts with 000001, denoting the result of the first iteration. The files contain the significant components within the prewhitening cascade as preliminary results. The MultiSine least-squares fits which are performed at each step of the prewhitening sequence modify frequencies, amplitudes and phases. Therefore it may be useful to have additional results from earlier iterations in hands, if the user decides not to use all components found by SIGSPEC without re-running the program.

The keyword results expects two integer parameters. The first defines the number of iterations for which these files shall be generated. A negative number causes SIGSPEC to generate files for all iterations. The second parameter has to be a positive number and defines a step width. If it is set 1, a result file is generated after each iteration, if it is set 2, after every second iteration (starting with r000002.dat), and so on.

Example. The sample project output uses the keyword results in the file output.ini, namely

results -1 1

providing result files r000001.dat, r000002.dat,..., for all iterations of the entire prewhitening sequence. In addition, the final result after all prewhitening iterations is contained in the file results.dat.