Nature 344, 734 - 741 (19 April 1990); doi:10.1038/344734a0

Nonlinear forecasting as a way of distinguishing chaos from measurement error in time series

George Sugihara^* & Robert M. May^†

^* Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California 92093, USA
^† Department of Zoology, Oxford University, Oxford, 0X1 3PS, UK

An approach is presented for making short-term predictions about the trajectories of chaotic dynamical systems. The method is applied to data on measles, chickenpox, and marine phytoplankton populations, to show how apparent noise associated with deterministic chaos can be distinguished from sampling error and other sources of externally induced environmental noise.

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