Is dark matter real or just a convenient hypothesis? Although it was first proposed almost a century ago, physicists have yet to uncover its true nature. Scientists from the Nicolaus Copernicus University are investigating the phenomenon using atomic clocks.

The article presents results of the influence of the GMDH (Group Method of Data Handling) neural network input data preparation method on the results of predicting corrections for the Polish timescale UTC(PL). Prediction of corrections was carried out using two methods, time series analysis and regression. As appropriate to these methods, the input data was prepared based on two time series, ts1 and ts2. The implemented research concerned the designation of the prediction errors on certain days of the forecast and the influence of the quantity of data on the prediction error. The obtained results indicate that in the case of the GMDH neural network the best quality of forecasting for UTC(PL) can be obtained using the time-series analysis method. The prediction errors obtained did not exceed the value of ± 8 ns, which confirms the possibility of maintaining the Polish timescale at a high level of compliance with the UTC.

In this paper a new method of frequency jumps detection in data from atomic clock comparisons is proposed. The presented approach is based on histogram analysis for different time intervals averaging phasetime data recorded over a certain period of time. Our method allows identification of multiple frequency jumps for long data series as well to almost real-time jump detection in combination with advanced filtering. Several methods of preliminary data processing have been tested (simple averaging, moving average and Vondrak filtration), to achieve flexibility in adjusting the algorithm parameters for current needs which is the key to its use in determining ensemble time scale or to control systems of physical time scales, such as UTC(PL). The best results have been achieved with the Vondrak filter.