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Concept
Change detection
Summary
In statistical analysis, change detection or change point detection tries to identify times when the probability distribution of a stochastic process or time series changes. In general the problem concerns both detecting whether or not a change has occurred, or whether several changes might have occurred, and identifying the times of any such changes.
Specific applications, like step detection and edge detection, may be concerned with changes in the mean, variance, correlation, or spectral density of the process. More generally change detection also includes the detection of anomalous behavior: anomaly detection.
A time series measures the progression of one or more quantities over time. For instance, the figure above shows the level of water in the Nile river between 1870 and 1970. Change point detection is concerned with identifying whether, and if so when, the behavior of the series changes significantly. In the Nile river example, the volume of water changes significantly after a dam was built in the river. Importantly, anomalous observations that differ from the ongoing behavior of the time series are not generally considered change points as long as the series returns to its previous behavior afterwards.
Mathematically, we can describe a time series as an ordered sequence of observations . We can write the joint distribution of a subset of the time series as . If the goal is to determine whether a change point occurred at a time in a finite time series of length , then we really ask whether equals . This problem can be generalized to the case of more than one change point.
The problem of change point detection can be narrowed down further into more specific problems. In offline change point detection it is assumed that a sequence of length is available and the goal is to identify whether any change point(s) occurred in the series. This is an example of post hoc analysis and is often approached using hypothesis testing methods. By contrast, online change point detection is concerned with detecting change points in an incoming data stream.
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