Determining chaotic behavior from experimental data: An alternative to the Lyapunov exponents

The present work aims to find an alternative way to the classical Lyapunov exponents of characterizing the chaotic behavior of a system. The procedures that compute Lyapunov exponents use complicated mathematical operations, such as base change and linearization of the investigated system. The main advantage of the proposed procedure is that it can be applied to experimental data records, without knowing the equations that produced the investigated signals. The tridimensional Hénon map is used for exemplification.