This paper considers the problem of joint change detection and identification assuming multiple composite postchange hypotheses. We propose a multihypothesis changepoint detection-identification procedure that controls the probabilities of false alarm and wrong identification. We show that the proposed procedure is asymptotically minimax and pointwise optimal, minimizing moments of the detection delay as probabilities of false alarm and wrong identification approach zero. The asymptotic optimality properties hold for general stochastic models with dependent observations. We illustrate general results for detection-identification of changes in multistream Markov ergodic processes. We consider several examples, including an application to rapid detection-identification of COVID-19 in Italy. Our proposed sequential algorithm allows much faster detection of COVID-19 than standard methods.
We study the detection of a sparse change in a high-dimensional mean vector as a minimax testing problem. Our first main contribution is to derive the exact minimax testing rate across all parameter regimes for $n$ independent, $p$-variate Gaussian observations. This rate exhibits a phase transition when the sparsity level is of order $\sqrt{p \log \log (8n)}$ and has a very delicate dependence on the sample size: in a certain sparsity regime it involves a triple iterated logarithmic factor in~$n$. Further, in a dense asymptotic regime, we identify the sharp leading constant, while in the corr…
We consider the estimation of a density at a fixed point under a local differential privacy constraint, where the observations are anonymised before being available for statistical inference. We propose both a privatised version of a projection density estimator as well as a kernel density estimator and derive their minimax rates under a privacy constraint. There is a twofold deterioration of the minimax rates due to the anonymisation, which we show to be unavoidable by providing lower bounds. In both estimation procedures a tuning parameter has to be chosen. We suggest a variant of the classi…