A positive Lyapunov exponent is one practical definition of chaos. We develop a formal test for chaos in a noisy system based on the consistent standard errors of the nonparametric Lyapunov exponent estimators. When our procedures are applied to international real output series, the hypothesis...

This paper derives the asymptotic distribution of the nonparametric neural network estimator of the Lyapunov exponent in a noisy system. Positivity of the Lyapunov exponent is an operational definition of chaos. We introduce a statistical framework for testing the chaotic hypothesis based on the...