On Correlated-noise Analyses Applied To Exoplanet Light Curves

Understand

Time-correlated noise is a significant source of uncertainty when modeling exoplanet light-curve data.

• A correct assessment of correlated noise is fundamental to determine the true statistical significance of our findings.
• Here we review three of the most widely used correlated-noise estimators in the exoplanet field, the time-averaging, residual-permutation, and wavelet-likelihood methods.
• We argue that the residual-permutation method is unsound in estimating the uncertainty of parameter estimates.