Bootstrap model selection for polynomial phase signals

We consider the problem of estimating the order of the phase of a complex valued signal, having a constant amplitude and a polynomial phase, measured in additive noise. A new method based on the bootstrap is introduced. The proposed approach does not require knowledge of the distribution of the noise, is easy to implement, and unlike existing techniques, it achieves high performance when only a small amount of data is available. The proposed technique can be easily extended to non-stationary signals which have a polynomial amplitude and phase, provided a consistent estimator for the parameters can be obtained