A box-counting red herring

Box counting is commonly used as a method to determine the multifractal spectrum of measured time series. Here we show that delta-correlated signals, having an (hyper)exponential amplitude distribution, can generate a spurious detection of multifractality. The situation becomes even worse for nonlinearly-filtered, Linear autoregressive processes. Care should thus be exerted when claiming the presence of multifractality in measured data.