Asymptotic Normality of the Contraction Mapping Estimator for Frequency Estimation

: This paper investigates the asymptotic distribution of the recently-proposed contraction mapping (CM) method for frequency estimation. Given a finite sample composed of a sinusoidal signal in additive noise, the CM method applies to the data a parametric filter that matches its parameter with the first-order autocorrelation of the filtered noise. The CM estimator is defined as the fixed-point of the parametrized first-order sample autocorrelation of the filtered data. In this paper, it is proved that under appropriate conditions, the CM estimator is asymptotically normal with a variance inversely related to the signal-to-noise ratio. A useful example of the AR(2) filter is discussed in detail to illustrate the performance of the CM method.