A Composite Likelihood-based Approach for Change-point Detection in Spatio-temporal Processes

This paper develops a unified and computationally efficient method for change-point estimation along the time dimension in a non-stationary spatio-temporal process. By modeling a non-stationary spatio-temporal process as a piecewise stationary spatio-temporal process, we consider simultaneous estimation of the number and locations of change-points, and model parameters in each segment. A composite likelihood-based criterion is developed for change-point and parameter estimation. Under the framework of increasing domain asymptotics, theoretical results including consistency and distribution of the estimators are derived under mild conditions. In contrast to classical results in fixed dimensional time series that the localization error of change-point estimator is Op(1), exact recovery of true change-points is possible in the spatio-temporal setting. More surprisingly, the consistency of change-point estimation can be achieved without any penalty term in the criterion function. In addition, we further establish consistency of the change-point estimator under the infill asymptotics framework where the time domain is increasing while the spatial sampling domain is fixed. A computationally efficient pruned dynamic programming algorithm is developed for the challenging criterion optimization problem. Extensive simulation studies and an application to the U.S. precipitation data are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness and practicality of the proposed method.