fastcpd: Fast Change Point Detection in R

Change point analysis is concerned with detecting and locating structure breaks in the underlying model of a sequence of observations ordered by time, space or other variables. A widely adopted approach for change point analysis is to minimize an objective function with a penalty term on the number of change points. This framework includes several well-established procedures, such as the penalized log-likelihood using the (modified) Bayesian information criterion (BIC) or the minimum description length (MDL). The resulting optimization problem can be solved in polynomial time by dynamic programming or its improved version, such as the Pruned Exact Linear Time (PELT) algorithm (Killick, Fearnhead, and Eckley 2012). However, existing computational methods often suffer from two primary limitations: (1) methods based on direct implementation of dynamic programming or PELT are often time-consuming for long data sequences due to repeated computation of the cost value over different segments of the data sequence; (2) state-of-the-art R packages do not provide enough flexibility for users to handle different change point settings and models. In this work, we present the fastcpd package, aiming to provide an efficient and versatile framework for change point detection in several commonly encountered settings. The core of our algorithm is built upon PELT and the sequential gradient descent method recently proposed by Zhang and Dawn (2023). We illustrate the usage of the fastcpd package through several examples, including mean/variance changes in a (multivariate) Gaussian sequence, parameter changes in regression models, structural breaks in ARMA/GARCH/VAR models, and changes in user-specified models.