Tanubhrt.This.Side

The post has been created using the Python Data Analysis book and the blog on Python found in Google and Youtube.

Signal Processing

Signal Processing is a field of engineering and applied mathematics that analyzes analog and digital signals, corresponding to variables that vary with time. Now, let us delve a little bit more into this one.

What is signal?
In the most basic form, signal is actually, everything that has information in it. So, the voice, chirping of birds, fragrances of the flowers, everything is a signal.

Signal can also be understood as a real or complex valued function of one or more real variables. When the function depends on single value, it is called single dimension variable. A speech signal, daily maximum temperature, annual rainfall at a place are all examples of single dimension signals. When the function depends on one or more variable, it is called a multi-dimensional signal. So, an image represents a two-dimensional signal. The world we live in is four dimensional, three spatial and fourth is temporal.

Now, coming back to our main question – what is signal processing?

Processing basically means that one is operating on it. So, when we talk about signal processing, signal processing means that we are operating in some fashion on a signal to extract some useful information. The signal processor could be either electronic system, mechanical system or a computer program.

There are two types of signal processing –

1. Digital Signal Processing
2. Analog Signal Processing

One of the techniques to do signal processing is called time series analysis. Hearing the word time series analysis, I am sure you must be able to understand that it basically means that the data is analyzed based on the time series.

Time series is an ordered list of data points starting with the oldest measurements first. The data points are usually equidistant, for instant, consistent with daily or annual sampling. In time series analysis, the order of the values is important. It is common to derive a relation between a value and another data point or combination of data points a fixed number of periods in the past, in the same time series.

In the next post of this series, we will be learning about statsmodels package.

Source – https://nptel.ac.in/courses/Webcourse-contents/IIT-KANPUR/Digi_Sign_Pro/pdf/ch1.pdf

Happy Learning 🙂