Detrended Fluctuation Analysis for Continuous Real Variable Functions

Abstract: Based on the well-known Detrended Fluctuation Analysis (DFA) for time series, in this work we describe a DFA for continuous real variable functions. Under certain conditions, DFA accurately predicts the long-term auto-correlation of the time series, depending on the value of certain scaling parameter. We show that for continuous functions, the proposed continuous DFA also exhibits fractal properties and approximates a power law with scaling exponent one.