----- An appropriate amount of overlap will depend on the choice of window and on your requirements. For the default Hann window an overlap of 50% is a reasonable trade off between accurately estimating the signal power, while not over counting any of the data. Narrower windows may require a larger overlap. If `noverlap` is 0, this method is equivalent to Bartlett's method [2]_. Consult the :ref:`tutorial_SpectralAnalysis` section of the :ref:`user_guide` for a discussion of the scalings of the power spectral density and the (squared) magnitude spectrum. .. versionadded:: 0.12.0 References ---------- .. [1] P. Welch, "The use of the fast Fourier transform for the estimation of power spectra: A method based on time averaging over short, modified periodograms", IEEE Trans. Audio Electroacoust. vol. 15, pp. 70-73, 1967. .. [2] M.S. Bartlett, "Periodogram Analysis and Continuous Spectra", Biometrika, vol. 37, pp. 1-16, 1950. Examples -------- >>> import numpy as np >>> from scipy import signal >>> import matplotlib.pyplot as plt >>> rng = np.random.default_rng() Generate a test signal, a 2 Vrms sine wave at 1234 Hz, corrupted by 0.001 V**2/Hz of white noise sampled at 10 kHz. >>> fs = 10e3 >>> N = 1e5 >>> amp = 2*np.sqrt(2) >>> freq = 1234.0 >>> noise_power = 0.001 * fs / 2 >>> time = np.arange(N) / fs >>> x = amp*np.sin(2*np.pi*freq*time) >>> x += rng.normal(scale=np.sqrt(noise_power), size=time.shape) Compute and plot the power spectral density. >>> f, Pxx_den = signal.welch(x, fs, nperseg=1024) >>> plt.semilogy(f, Pxx_den) >>> plt.ylim([0.5e-3, 1]) >>> plt.xlabel('frequency [Hz]') >>> plt.ylabel('PSD [V**2/Hz]') >>> plt.show() If we average the last half of the spectral density, to exclude the peak, we can recover the noise power on the signal. >>> np.mean(Pxx_den[256:]) 0.0009924865443739191 Now compute and plot the power spectrum. >>> f, Pxx_spec = signal.welch(x, fs, 'flattop', 1024, scaling='spectrum') >>> plt.figure() >>> plt.semilogy(f, np.sqrt(Pxx_spec)) >>> plt.xlabel('frequency [Hz]') >>> plt.ylabel('Linear spectrum [V RMS]') >>> plt.show() The peak height in the power spectrum is an estimate of the RMS amplitude. >>> np.sqrt(Pxx_spec.max()) 2.0077340678640727 If we now introduce a discontinuity in the signal, by increasing the amplitude of a small portion of the signal by 50, we can see the corruption of the mean average power spectral density, but using a median average better estimates the normal behaviour. >>> x[int(N//2):int(N//2)+10] *= 50. >>> f, Pxx_den = signal.welch(x, fs, nperseg=1024) >>> f_med, Pxx_den_med = signal.welch(x, fs, nperseg=1024, average='median') >>> plt.semilogy(f, Pxx_den, label='mean') >>> plt.semilogy(f_med, Pxx_den_med, label='median') >>> plt.ylim([0.5e-3, 1]) >>> plt.xlabel('frequency [Hz]') >>> plt.ylabel('PSD [V**2/Hz]') >>> plt.legend() >>> plt.show() ) rW