On the Behavior of a Capon-Type Spectral Density Estimator

Abstract

In this paper we propose a Capon-type estimator for the spectrum of a stationary time series. This estimator may be viewed as an alternative to classical periodogram-based estimators. Its advantage is that it copes with the "leakage effect" by using implicitly automatic adaptive windowing. We show its asymptotic equivalence to a random variable which is a quadratic form in the observations, thus obtaining the asymptotic normality of the Capon estimator. We also study its asymptotic bias and variance.