Characteristic flare shape of NIR and X-ray flares. Left: normalized data segments for the 25 flares highlighted in Fig. 1. The thick red line indicates the first principal component derived from the data and the thin blue line the first principal component derived from the X-ray Chandra data (see the middle panel). Middle: same as the left panel for the 26 Chandra X-ray flares. Right: explained cumulative variance of the PCA components of Spitzer (red) and Chandra data (blue).