Bench-marking time series with reliable bench-marks

This paper investigates the implications for the signal extraction bench-marking method when the bench-marks are observed without error and when the variance of the survey errors is relatively small. Conditions under which the solutions of several numerical bench-marking approaches are optimal are derived. It is shown that these numerical methods are particular cases of the signal extraction method. Comparisons between the numerically derived methods and the signal extraction method are made in the light of a particular survey