A Remark on Adaptive Decomp osition for Nonlinear Time-frequency Analysis

In recent study the bank of real square integrable functions that have nonlinear phases and admit a well-behaved Hilbert transform has been constructed for adaptive representation of nonlinear signals. We first show in this paper that the available basic functions are adequate for establishing an ideal adaptive decomposi-tion algorithm. However, we also point out that the best approximation algorithm, which is a common strategy in decomposing a function into a sum of functions in a prescribed class of basis functions, should not be considered as a candidate for the ideal algorithm.