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Many natural phenomena can be described by power-laws. A closer look at various experimental data reveals more or less significant deviations from a 1/f spectrum. We exemplify such cases with phenomena offered by molecular biology, cell biophysics, and cognitive psychology. Some of these cases can be described by first order autoregressive (AR) models or by higher order AR models which are short range correlation models. The calculations are checked against astrophysical data which were fitted to a an AR model by a different method. We found that our fitting method of the data give similar results for the astrhophysical data and therefore applied the method for examples mentioned above. Our results show that such phenomena can be described by first or higher order of AR models. Therefore such examples are described by short range correlation properties while they can be easily confounded with long range correlation phenomena., Comment: 17 pages, 13 figures

The stochastic processes of finite length defined by recurrence relations request additional relations specifying the first terms of the process analogously to the initial conditions for the differential equations. As a general rule, in time series theory one analyzes only stochastic processes of infinite length which need no such initial conditions and their properties are less difficult to be determined. In this paper we compare the properties of the order 1 autoregressive processes of finite and infinite length and we prove that the time series length has an important influence mainly if the serial correlation is significant. These different properties can manifest themselves as transient effects produced when a time series is numerically generated. We show that for an order 1 autoregressive process the transient behavior can be avoided if the first term is a Gaussian random variable with standard deviation equal to that of the theoretical infinite process and not to that of the white noise innovation., Comment: 9 pages, 8 figures