Abstract: Data analysis strategies for gravitational wave detection, in particular for burst signals, are simplified a lot if the data is transformed into white, stationary noise. This has to be done without sacrificing the signal to noise ratio. We describe some algorithms for this purpose. The algorithms deal with line removal, noise floor whitening and change point detection. Though developed in the context of gravitational wave detection, these algorithms can be used to transform any complicated data set if it shares the same features as that from gravitational wave detectors.