Changepoint Detection in the Presence of Outliers

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.