Comparative study of period determination methods

Simulations have been run to compare the performance of several period determination algorithms: essentially Fourier's, Lafler-Kinman's and Stellingwerf's methods have been considered, as well as a couple of variants. The application to single-periodic phenomena shows that none of the methods is clearly superior to the others. Fourier's and the non-parametric methods have relatively different scopes and they are, to some extent, complementary.