A suboptimal estimator of the sampling jitter variance using the bispectrum

We consider the problem of estimating parameters of an irregular sampling process defined as a uniform sampling process in which the deviations from the nominal sampling times constitute a random IID process (jitter). Emphasis is placed on estimating the variance of the jitter, based on observation of samples taken from a continuous band-limited third-order stationary process. We derive an estimation procedure which uses the bispectrum estimates of a process with a priori known bispectrum. Derivation of the generalized likelihood ratio in the bispectral domain, leads to a statistic with which a bispectrum-based maximum likelihood estimation can be done. We propose a suboptimal estimator, and show that it is asymptotically unbiased and consistent. The dependence of the estimator's performance on the data length and the skewness is studied for a specific example. The estimator's variance is compared to the bispectrum-based Cramer-Rao bound (BCRB), and is shown to approach it for sufficiently large data length or skewness. Computer simulations verify the effectiveness of the proposed estimation method for small jitter.