Ensembles of detectors for online detection of transient changes

Abstract

Classical change-point detection procedures assume a change-point model to be known and a change consisting in establishing a new observations regime, i.e. the change lasts infinitely long. These modeling assumptions contradicts applied problems statements. Therefore, even theoretically optimal statistics in practice very often fail when detecting transient changes online. In this work in order to overcome limitations of classical change-point detection procedures we consider approaches to constructing ensembles of change-point detectors, i.e. algorithms that use many detectors to reliably identify a change-point. We propose a learning paradigm and specific implementations of ensembles for change detection of short-term (transient) changes in observed time series. We demonstrate by means of numerical experiments that the performance of an ensemble is superior to that of the conventional change-point detection procedures.