Periodicity and fundamental frequency detection algorithms I have some time series datasets which are periodic, and I'd like to pick out the fundamental frequency of the data and take the average over a fundamental period.

Questions:

1) Would something simple like taking the FFT of the time series data and looking for the strongest peak frequency do the trick, or are there more complicated period detection algorithms out there? For what it's worth, I'm trying to do all this in MATLAB.

2) There are some edge effects, particularly at the beginning of each data set. Would I have to take this into account?
This is essentially the problem of Pitch Detection.  A fairly simple approach is to compute the autocorrelation (FFTs can be used to do this quickly),  and look for the peak with T > T_min