The AAFT uses phase-scrambling to create a surrogate of the time series that
has a similar spectrum (and hence similar second-order statistics). The AAFT
is useful for testing for non-linearity in a time series, and is used by
nonlintest.
References
Kugiumtzis D (2000) Surrogate data test for nonlinearity
including monotonic transformations, Phys. Rev. E, vol 62