An efficient method of distinguishing chaos from noise

It is an important problem in chaos theory whether an observed irregular signal is deterministic chaotic or stochastic. We propose an efficient method for distinguishing deterministic chaotic from stochastic time series for short scalar time series. We first investigate, with the increase of the embedding dimension, the changing trend of the distance between two points which stay close in phase space. And then, we obtain the differences between Gaussian white noise and deterministic chaotic time series underlying this method. Finally, numerical experiments are presented to testify the validity and robustness of the method. Simulation results indicate that our method can distinguish deterministic chaotic from stochastic time series effectively even when the data are short and contaminated.