Simulated light curves and derived structure functions. Upper panels: Light curves for different values of α (Equation 9) as labeled. The light curves were generated by the MA model (Equation 7) and include random and correlated noise with the random seed the same for all panels. The kernels are double-exponential profiles (Equation 10), and the innovation R = U^α was drawn from uniformly distributed samples in [0, 1). Colors at the left mark sections of the light curve with 5 000 and 50 000 samples with the full curves containing 500 000. Lower panels: Structure functions of the simulated light curve above each panel. The black curve shows the true structure function without noise. The colored curves show the structure function derived from each light curve with a finite number of samples as labeled.