Choosing an optimal sampling rate to improve the performance of signal analysis by prony's method

Many physical phenomena are described by equations whose solution is an exponential decay. Determining the amplitudes, damping factors and oscillating frequencies from experimental data is a common task in various areas of science and technology. Prony's method is a well-known tool for estimating these parameters. However in some cases, especially when the signal-to-noise ratio is small, Prony's method may inaccurately estimate damping factors and oscillating frequencies. Hence, this paper investigates possible ways for improving the performance of Prony's method when analyzing the output signal of a pressure transducer. It is shown that by choosing optimal parameter values to reduce the condition number it is possible to increase the accuracy of Prony's method. The algorithm for choosing the optimal sampling rate is presented.