File:RPDE ranking.gif

Summary
How RPDE ranks signals by their phase space periodicity. The small panels are depictions of the time series, and the large scale in the middle is the RPDE value. It can be seen that purely periodic signals, regardless of harmonic content in a spectral sense, have an RPDE value of zero. Randomly forced periodic oscillation has a higher value, followed by chaotic systems, randomly forced linear resonators, autocorrelated random processes, and at the extreme, uniform random noise has an RPDE value of nearly one.