A Nonparametric Approach for Multiple Change Point Analysis of Multivariate Data

Change point analysis has applications in a wide variety of fields. The general problem concerns the inference of a change in distribution for a set of time-ordered observations. Sequential detection is an online version in which new data are continually arriving and are analyzed adaptively. We are concerned with the related, but distinct, offline version, in which retrospective analysis of an entire sequence is performed. For a set of multivariate observations of arbitrary dimension, we consider nonparametric estimation of both the number of change points and the positions at which they occur. We do not make any assumptions regarding the nature of the change in distribution or any distribution assumptions…