Estimating time delays for constructing dynamical networks

Abstract. Dynamical networks – networks inferred from multivariate time series – have been widely applied to climate data and beyond, resulting in new insights into the underlying dynamics. However, these inferred networks can suffer from biases that need to be accounted for to properly interpret the results. Here, we report on a previously unrecognized bias in the estimate of time delays between nodes in dynamical networks inferred from cross-correlations, a method often used. This bias results in the maximum correlation occurring disproportionately often at large time lags. This is of particular concern in dynamical networks where the large number of possible links necessitates finding the correct time lag in an automated way. We show that this bias can arise due to the similarity of the estimator to a random walk, and are able to map them to each other explicitly for some cases. For the random walk there is an analytical solution for the bias that is closely related to the famous Lévy arcsine distribution, which provides an upper bound in many other cases. Finally, we show that estimating the cross-correlation in frequency space effectively eliminates this bias. Reanalysing large lag links (from a climate network) with this method results in a distribution peaked near zero instead, as well as additional peaks at the originally assigned lag. Links that are reassigned smaller time lags tend to have a smaller distance between them, which indicates that the new time delays are physically reasonable.