2. Empirical Mode Decomposition
2.1. EMD theory and algorithm
EMD is a generally nonlinear, non-stationary data processing method developed by Huang
et al. (1998). It assumes that the data, depending on its complexity, may have many different
coexisting modes of oscillations at the same time. EMD can extract these intrinsic modes from the
original time series, based on the local characteristic scale of data itself, and represent each intrinsic
mode as an intrinsic mode function (IMF), which meets the following two conditions:
1) The functions have the same numbers of extrema and zero-crossings or differ at the most by
one;
2) The functions are symmetric with respect to local zero mean.
The two conditions ensure that an IMF is a nearly periodic function and the mean is set to zero.
IMF is a harmonic-like function, but with variable amplitude and frequency at different times.
In practice, the IMFs are extracted through a sifting process. The EMD algorithm is described
as follows:
1) Identify all the maxima and minima of time series x(t);
2) Generate its upper and lower envelopes, emin(t) and emax(t), with cubic spline interpolation.
3) Calculate the point-by-point mean (m(t)) from upper and lower envelopes:
mðtÞ ¼ ðeminðtÞ þ emaxðtÞÞ=2 ð1Þ
4) Extract the mean from the time series and define the difference of x(t) and m(t) as d(t):
dðtÞ ¼ xðtÞ−mðtÞ ð2Þ