arXiv subjects

Idris A. Eckley

Publications and source records attributed to Idris A. Eckley.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

focus and focus-cpt: Fast Online Changepoint Detection in R and Python

We present an R and Python package for fast online changepoint detection in univariate and multivariate data streams for a variety of models. The package implements the focus family of algorithms, which compute the Generalised Likelihood Ratio test for a single changepoint exactly and efficiently, with a per-iteration cost of approximately $\log(n)^d$ for a d-dimensional sequence, without introducing approximations. This is achieved by exploiting a connection between the location of the changepoint candidates and the geometry of the data. The package supports a broad range of models from the natural exponential family, including Gaussian, Poisson, Binomial, Exponential and Gamma distributions, as well as a non-parametric detector based on the empirical cumulative distribution function and a detector for autoregressive data.

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arXiv2026

An Efficient Likelihood Ratio Test for Online Changepoint Detection in the Presence of Autocorrelation

Changepoint detection methods have seen considerable development in recent years, with online algorithms capable of identifying structural changes in streaming data in near real time. However, the majority of existing methods are designed under the assumption of IID observations, rendering them susceptible to either more false positives or longer detection delays when applied to data exhibiting temporal dependence, a common feature of many real-world data streams. In this article, we extend the generalised likelihood-ratio (GLR) statistic to autoregressive processes of order $p$, and adapt the focus algorithm to develop a computationally efficient online change detector. The resulting AR($p$)-focus algorithm achieves an average computational cost of $\mathcal{O}(\log n)$ per iteration, making it suitable for high-frequency data streams. Through simulation studies, the proposed approach is seen achieving greater detection power than IID-based tests when the underlying data exhibit temporal correlation. We further illustrate the practical utility of AR($p$)-focus through an application to a real-world telecommunications dataset.

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arXiv2026

Detection of collective and point anomalies in the presence of trend and seasonality

Detecting anomalies in time series data is a challenging task with broad relevance in many applications. Existing methods work effectively only under idealized conditions, typically focusing on point anomalies or assuming a constant baseline. Our approach overcomes these limitations by detecting both collective and point anomalies, while allowing for polynomial trends and seasonal patterns. We establish statistical theory demonstrating that our method accurately decomposes the time series into anomaly, trend, seasonality, and remainder components. We further show that the approach provides a consistent estimate of the number of anomalies and their locations. Simulation studies confirm its strong detection performance with finite samples, and an application to energy price data illustrates its practical utility.

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arXiv2024

A communication-efficient, online changepoint detection method for monitoring distributed sensor networks

We consider the challenge of efficiently detecting changes within a network of sensors, where we also need to minimise communication between sensors and the cloud. We propose an online, communication-efficient method to detect such changes. The procedure works by performing likelihood ratio tests at each time point, and two thresholds are chosen to filter unimportant test statistics and make decisions based on the aggregated test statistics respectively. We provide asymptotic theory concerning consistency and the asymptotic distribution if there are no changes. Simulation results suggest that our method can achieve similar performance to the idealised setting, where we have no constraints on communication between sensors, but substantially reduce the transmission costs.

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arXiv2024

anomaly : Detection of Anomalous Structure in Time Series Data

One of the contemporary challenges in anomaly detection is the ability to detect, and differentiate between, both point and collective anomalies within a data sequence or time series. The anomaly package has been developed to provide users with a choice of anomaly detection methods and, in particular, provides an implementation of the recently proposed Collective And Point Anomaly family of anomaly detection algorithms. This article describes the methods implemented whilst also highlighting their application to simulated data as well as real data examples contained in the package.

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arXiv2023

Gamma-ray burst detection with Poisson-FOCuS and other trigger algorithms

We describe how a novel online changepoint detection algorithm, called Poisson-FOCuS, can be used to optimally detect gamma-ray bursts within the computational constraints imposed by miniaturized satellites such as the upcoming HERMES-Pathfinder constellation. Poisson-FOCuS enables testing for gamma-ray burst onset at all intervals in a count time series, across all timescales and offsets, in real-time and at a fraction of the computational cost of conventional strategies. We validate an implementation with automatic background assessment through exponential smoothing, using archival data from Fermi-GBM. Through simulations of lightcurves modeled after real short and long gamma-ray bursts, we demonstrate that the same implementation has higher detection power than algorithms designed to emulate the logic of Fermi-GBM and Compton-BATSE, reaching the performances of a brute-force benchmark with oracle information on the true background rate, when not hindered by automatic background assessment. Finally, using simulated data with different lengths and means, we show that Poisson-FOCuS can analyze data twice as fast as a similarly implemented benchmark emulator for the historic Fermi-GBM on-board trigger algorithms.

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arXiv2023

Automatic Locally Stationary Time Series Forecasting with application to predicting U.K. Gross Value Added Time Series under sudden shocks caused by the COVID pandemic

Accurate forecasting of the U.K. gross value added (GVA) is fundamental for measuring the growth of the U.K. economy. A common nonstationarity in GVA data, such as the ABML series, is its increase in variance over time due to inflation. Transformed or inflation-adjusted series can still be challenging for classical stationarity-assuming forecasters. We adopt a different approach that works directly with the GVA series by advancing recent forecasting methods for locally stationary time series. Our approach results in more accurate and reliable forecasts, and continues to work well even when the ABML series becomes highly variable during the COVID pandemic.

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arXiv2023

High-dimensional time series segmentation via factor-adjusted vector autoregressive modelling

Vector autoregressive (VAR) models are popularly adopted for modelling high-dimensional time series, and their piecewise extensions allow for structural changes in the data. In VAR modelling, the number of parameters grow quadratically with the dimensionality which necessitates the sparsity assumption in high dimensions. However, it is debatable whether such an assumption is adequate for handling datasets exhibiting strong serial and cross-sectional correlations. We propose a piecewise stationary time series model that simultaneously allows for strong correlations as well as structural changes, where pervasive serial and cross-sectional correlations are accounted for by a time-varying factor structure, and any remaining idiosyncratic dependence between the variables is handled by a piecewise stationary VAR model. We propose an accompanying two-stage data segmentation methodology which fully addresses the challenges arising from the latency of the component processes. Its consistency in estimating both the total number and the locations of the change points in the latent components, is established under conditions considerably more general than those in the existing literature. We demonstrate the competitive performance of the proposed methodology on simulated datasets and an application to US blue chip stocks data.

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arXiv2022

Consistency of a range of penalised cost approaches for detecting multiple changepoints

A common approach to detect multiple changepoints is to minimise a measure of data fit plus a penalty that is linear in the number of changepoints. This paper shows that the general finite sample behaviour of such a method can be related to its behaviour when analysing data with either none or one changepoint. This results in simpler conditions for verifying whether the method will consistently estimate the number and locations of the changepoints. We apply and demonstrate the usefulness of this result for a range of changepoint problems. Our new results include a weaker condition on the choice of penalty required to have consistency in a change-in-slope model; and the first results for the accuracy of recently-proposed methods for detecting spikes.

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arXiv2021

Scalable changepoint and anomaly detection in cross-correlated data with an application to condition monitoring

Motivated by a condition monitoring application arising from subsea engineering we derive a novel, scalable approach to detecting anomalous mean structure in a subset of correlated multivariate time series. Given the need to analyse such series efficiently we explore a computationally efficient approximation of the maximum likelihood solution to the resulting modelling framework, and develop a new dynamic programming algorithm for solving the resulting Binary Quadratic Programme when the precision matrix of the time series at any given time-point is banded. Through a comprehensive simulation study, we show that the resulting methods perform favourably compared to competing methods both in the anomaly and change detection settings, even when the sparsity structure of the precision matrix estimate is misspecified. We also demonstrate its ability to correctly detect faulty time-periods of a pump within the motivating application.

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arXiv2020

Real Time Anomaly Detection And Categorisation

The ability to quickly and accurately detect anomalous structure within data sequences is an inference challenge of growing importance. This work extends recently proposed post-hoc (offline) anomaly detection methodology to the sequential setting. The resultant procedure is capable of real-time analysis and categorisation between baseline and two forms of anomalous structure: point and collective anomalies. Various theoretical properties of the procedure are derived. These, together with an extensive simulation study, highlight that the average run length to false alarm and the average detection delay of the proposed online algorithm are very close to that of the offline version. Experiments on simulated and real data are provided to demonstrate the benefits of the proposed method.

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arXiv2020

Innovative And Additive Outlier Robust Kalman Filtering With A Robust Particle Filter

In this paper, we propose CE-BASS, a particle mixture Kalman filter which is robust to both innovative and additive outliers, and able to fully capture multi-modality in the distribution of the hidden state. Furthermore, the particle sampling approach re-samples past states, which enables CE-BASS to handle innovative outliers which are not immediately visible in the observations, such as trend changes. The filter is computationally efficient as we derive new, accurate approximations to the optimal proposal distributions for the particles. The proposed algorithm is shown to compare well with existing approaches and is applied to both machine temperature and server data.

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arXiv2020

The Local Partial Autocorrelation Function and Some Applications

The classical regular and partial autocorrelation functions are powerful tools for stationary time series modelling and analysis. However, it is increasingly recognized that many time series are not stationary and the use of classical global autocorrelations can give misleading answers. This article introduces two estimators of the local partial autocorrelation function and establishes their asymptotic properties. The article then illustrates the use of these new estimators on both simulated and real time series. The examples clearly demonstrate the strong practical benefits of local estimators for time series that exhibit nonstationarities.

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arXiv2019

A linear time method for the detection of point and collective anomalies

The challenge of efficiently identifying anomalies in data sequences is an important statistical problem that now arises in many applications. Whilst there has been substantial work aimed at making statistical analyses robust to outliers, or point anomalies, there has been much less work on detecting anomalous segments, or collective anomalies, particularly in those settings where point anomalies might also occur. In this article, we introduce Collective And Point Anomalies (CAPA), a computationally efficient approach that is suitable when collective anomalies are characterised by either a change in mean, variance, or both, and distinguishes them from point anomalies. Theoretical results establish the consistency of CAPA at detecting collective anomalies and, as a by-product, the consistency of a popular penalised cost based change in mean and variance detection method. Empirical results show that CAPA has close to linear computational cost as well as being more accurate at detecting and locating collective anomalies than other approaches. We demonstrate the utility of CAPA through its ability to detect exoplanets from light curve data from the Kepler telescope.

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arXiv2018

Multivariate Locally Stationary Wavelet Process Analysis with the mvLSW R Package

This paper describes the R package mvLSW. The package contains a suite of tools for the analysis of multivariate locally stationary wavelet (LSW) time series. Key elements include: (i) the simulation of multivariate LSW time series for a given multivariate evolutionary wavelet spectrum (EWS); (ii) estimation of the time-dependent multivariate EWS for a given time series; (iii) estimation of the time-dependent coherence and partial coherence between time series channels; and, (iv) estimation of approximate confidence intervals for multivariate EWS estimates. A demonstration of the package is presented via both a simulated example and a case study with EuStockMarkets from the datasets package. This paper has been accepted by the Journal of Statistical Software. Presented code extracts demonstrating the mvLSW package is performed under version 1.2.1.

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arXiv2018

Dynamic detection of anomalous regions within distributed acoustic sensing data streams using locally stationary wavelet time series

Distributed acoustic sensing technology is increasingly being used to support production and well management within the oil and gas sector, for example to improve flow monitoring and production profiling. This sensing technology is capable of recording substantial data volumes at multiple depths within an oil well, giving unprecedented insights into production behaviour. However the technology is also prone to recording periods of anomalous behaviour, where the same physical features are concurrently observed at multiple depths. Such features are called `stripes' and are undesirable, detrimentally affecting well performance modelling. This paper focuses on the important challenge of developing a principled approach to identifying such anomalous periods within distributed acoustic signals. We extend recent work on classifying locally stationary wavelet time series to an online setting and, in so doing, introduce a computationally-efficient online procedure capable of accurately identifying anomalous regions within multivariate time series.

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arXiv2017

Minimum Spectral Connectivity Projection Pursuit

We study the problem of determining the optimal low dimensional projection for maximising the separability of a binary partition of an unlabelled dataset, as measured by spectral graph theory. This is achieved by finding projections which minimise the second eigenvalue of the graph Laplacian of the projected data, which corresponds to a non-convex, non-smooth optimisation problem. We show that the optimal univariate projection based on spectral connectivity converges to the vector normal to the maximum margin hyperplane through the data, as the scaling parameter is reduced to zero. This establishes a connection between connectivity as measured by spectral graph theory and maximal Euclidean separation. The computational cost associated with each eigen-problem is quadratic in the number of data. To mitigate this issue, we propose an approximation method using microclusters with provable approximation error bounds. Combining multiple binary partitions within a divisive hierarchical model allows us to construct clustering solutions admitting clusters with varying scales and lying within different subspaces. We evaluate the performance of the proposed method on a large collection of benchmark datasets and find that it compares favourably with existing methods for projection pursuit and dimension reduction for data clustering.

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arXiv2016

A computationally efficient nonparametric approach for changepoint detection

In this paper we build on an approach proposed by Zou et al. (2014) for nonpara- metric changepoint detection. This approach defines the best segmentation for a data set as the one which minimises a penalised cost function, with the cost function defined in term of minus a non-parametric log-likelihood for data within each segment. Min- imising this cost function is possible using dynamic programming, but their algorithm had a computational cost that is cubic in the length of the data set. To speed up computation, Zou et al. (2014) resorted to a screening procedure which means that the estimated segmentation is no longer guaranteed to be the global minimum of the cost function. We show that the screening procedure adversely affects the accuracy of the changepoint detection method, and show how a faster dynamic programming algorithm, Pruned Exact Linear Time, PELT (Killick et al., 2012), can be used to find the optimal segmentation with a computational cost that can be close to linear in the amount of data. PELT requires a penalty to avoid under/over-fitting the model which can have a detrimental effect on the quality of the detected changepoints. To overcome this issue we use a relatively new method, Changepoints Over a Range of PenaltieS (CROPS) (Haynes et al., 2015), which finds all of the optimal segmentations for multiple penalty values over a continuous range. We apply our method to detect changes in heart rate during physical activity.

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