Autoencoder-Based Parameter Estimation for Superposed Multi-Component Damped Sinusoidal Signals

arXiv cs.LG / 4/7/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper presents an autoencoder-based latent-space approach for estimating parameters (frequency, phase, decay time, amplitude) of each component in noisy, multi-component damped sinusoidal signals.
  • It targets difficult regimes such as rapidly decaying signals, superposed components, subdominant components, and nearly opposite-phase components.
  • The authors train and evaluate under different synthetic training-data distributions, comparing Gaussian vs uniform training to assess how training informativeness affects robustness.
  • Performance is measured using both waveform reconstruction quality and parameter-estimation accuracy, showing high accuracy in challenging cases and reasonable robustness under less informative training distributions.
  • The study positions the method as a practical tool for analyzing short-duration, noisy signals where conventional parameter estimation struggles.

Abstract

Damped sinusoidal oscillations are widely observed in many physical systems, and their analysis provides access to underlying physical properties. However, parameter estimation becomes difficult when the signal decays rapidly, multiple components are superposed, and observational noise is present. In this study, we develop an autoencoder-based method that uses the latent space to estimate the frequency, phase, decay time, and amplitude of each component in noisy multi-component damped sinusoidal signals. We investigate multi-component cases under Gaussian-distribution training and further examine the effect of the training-data distribution through comparisons between Gaussian and uniform training. The performance is evaluated through waveform reconstruction and parameter-estimation accuracy. We find that the proposed method can estimate the parameters with high accuracy even in challenging setups, such as those involving a subdominant component or nearly opposite-phase components, while remaining reasonably robust when the training distribution is less informative. This demonstrates its potential as a tool for analyzing short-duration, noisy signals.