Changepoint Detection in the Presence of Outliers

Paul Fearnhead and Guillem Rigaill

Journal of the American Statistical Association, 2019, vol. 114, issue 525, 169-183

Abstract: Many traditional methods for identifying changepoints can struggle in the presence of outliers, or when the noise is heavy-tailed. Often they will infer additional changepoints to fit the outliers. To overcome this problem, data often needs to be preprocessed to remove outliers, though this is difficult for applications where the data needs to be analyzed online. We present an approach to changepoint detection that is robust to the presence of outliers. The idea is to adapt existing penalized cost approaches for detecting changes so that they use loss functions that are less sensitive to outliers. We argue that loss functions that are bounded, such as the classical biweight loss, are particularly suitable—as we show that only bounded loss functions are robust to arbitrarily extreme outliers. We present an efficient dynamic programming algorithm that can find the optimal segmentation under our penalized cost criteria. Importantly, this algorithm can be used in settings where the data needs to be analyzed online. We show that we can consistently estimate the number of changepoints, and accurately estimate their locations, using the biweight loss function. We demonstrate the usefulness of our approach for applications such as analyzing well-log data, detecting copy number variation, and detecting tampering of wireless devices. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.

Date: 2019
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/01621459.2017.1385466 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:jnlasa:v:114:y:2019:i:525:p:169-183

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/UASA20

DOI: 10.1080/01621459.2017.1385466

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of the American Statistical Association is currently edited by Xuming He, Jun Liu, Joseph Ibrahim and Alyson Wilson

More articles in Journal of the American Statistical Association from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().