A nonparametric procedure to detect periods in time series

Suppose that for a given time series the experimenter knows that it has a certain periodic property and that he wishes to find out the length of the period. For this problem a nonparametric procedure is proposed. It consists of a new smoothing technique based on Kendall's Tau and a specific counting method. The procedure is studied under a simple model of periodic time series which are composed of periodic (deterministic) functions, a linear trend and exchangeable (stochastic) sequences. The performance of the procedure is illustrated by a simple example.