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Without imposing prior distributional knowledge underlying multivariate time series of interest, we propose a nonparametric change-point detection approach to estimate the number of change points and their locations along the temporal axis. We develop a structural subsampling procedure such that the observations are encoded into multiple sequences of Bernoulli variables. A maximum likelihood approach in conjunction with a newly developed searching algorithm is implemented to detect change points on each Bernoulli process separately. Then, aggregation statistics are proposed to collectively synthesize change-point results from all individual univariate time series into consistent and stable location estimations. We also study a weighting strategy to measure the degree of relevance for different subsampled groups. Simulation studies are conducted and shown that the proposed change-point methodology for multivariate time series has favorable performance comparing with currently popular nonparametric methods under various settings with different degrees of complexity. Real data analyses are finally performed on categorical, ordinal, and continuous time series taken from fields of genetics, climate, and finance.
Understanding forest fire spread in any region of Canada is critical to promoting forest health, and protecting human life and infrastructure. Quantifying fire spread from noisy images, where regions of a fire are separated by change-point boundaries, is critical to faithfully estimating fire spread rates. In this research, we develop a statistically consistent smooth estimator that allows us to denoise fire spread imagery from micro-fire experiments. We develop an anisotropic smoothing method for change-point data that uses estimates of the underlying data generating process to inform smoothing. We show that the anisotropic local constant regression estimator is consistent with convergence rate $Oleft(n^{-1/{(q+2)}}right)$. We demonstrate its effectiveness on simulated one- and two-dimensional change-point data and fire spread imagery from micro-fire experiments.
Structural breaks have been commonly seen in applications. Specifically for detection of change points in time, research gap still remains on the setting in ultra high dimension, where the covariates may bear spurious correlations. In this paper, we propose a two-stage approach to detect change points in ultra high dimension, by firstly proposing the dynamic titled current correlation screening method to reduce the input dimension, and then detecting possible change points in the framework of group variable selection. Not only the spurious correlation between ultra-high dimensional covariates is taken into consideration in variable screening, but non-convex penalties are studied in change point detection in the ultra high dimension. Asymptotic properties are derived to guarantee the asymptotic consistency of the selection procedure, and the numerical investigations show the promising performance of the proposed approach.
The variance of noise plays an important role in many change-point detection procedures and the associated inferences. Most commonly used variance estimators require strong assumptions on the true mean structure or normality of the error distribution, which may not hold in applications. More importantly, the qualities of these estimators have not been discussed systematically in the literature. In this paper, we introduce a framework of equivariant variance estimation for multiple change-point models. In particular, we characterize the set of all equivariant unbiased quadratic variance estimators for a family of change-point model classes, and develop a minimax theory for such estimators.
We consider the detection and localization of change points in the distribution of an offline sequence of observations. Based on a nonparametric framework that uses a similarity graph among observations, we propose new test statistics when at most one change point occurs and generalize them to multiple change points settings. The proposed statistics leverage edge weight information in the graphs, exhibiting substantial improvements in testing power and localization accuracy in simulations. We derive the null limiting distribution, provide accurate analytic approximations to control type I error, and establish theoretical guarantees on the power consistency under contiguous alternatives for the one change point setting, as well as the minimax localization rate. In the multiple change points setting, the asymptotic correctness of the number and location of change points are also guaranteed. The methods are illustrated on the MIT proximity network data.
Motivated by an example from remote sensing of gas emission sources, we derive two novel change point procedures for multivariate time series where, in contrast to classical change point literature, the changes are not required to be aligned in the different components of the time series. Instead the change points are described by a functional relationship where the precise shape depends on unknown parameters of interest such as the source of the gas emission in the above example. Two different types of tests and the corresponding estimators for the unknown parameters describing the change locations are proposed. We derive the null asymptotics for both tests under weak assumptions on the error time series and show asymptotic consistency under alternatives. Furthermore, we prove consistency for the corresponding estimators of the parameters of interest. The small sample behavior of the methodology is assessed by means of a simulation study and the above remote sensing example analyzed in detail.