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A Statistical Test of Change‐Point in Mean that Almost Surely Has Zero Error Probabilities
Author(s) -
Qian Guoqi,
Shi Xiaoping,
Wu Yuehua
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
australian and new zealand journal of statistics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.434
H-Index - 41
eISSN - 1467-842X
pISSN - 1369-1473
DOI - 10.1111/anzs.12049
Subject(s) - mathematics , estimator , null hypothesis , zero (linguistics) , convergence (economics) , sample size determination , statistics , statistical hypothesis testing , type i and type ii errors , point (geometry) , rate of convergence , test (biology) , infinity , mathematical analysis , computer science , computer network , paleontology , philosophy , linguistics , geometry , channel (broadcasting) , economics , biology , economic growth
Summary In this paper we develop a non‐conventional statistical test for the change‐point in a mean model by making use of an almost‐sure (a.s.) convergence (or strong convergence) result that we obtain, in respect of the difference between the sums of squared residuals under the null and alternative hypotheses. We prove that both types of error probabilities of the new test converge to zero almost surely when the sample size goes to infinity. This result does not hold for any conventional statistical test where the type I error probability, i.e. the significance level or the size, is prescribed at a low but non‐zero level (e.g. 0.05). The test developed is easy to use in practice, and is ready to be generalised to other change‐point models provided that the relevant almost‐sure convergence results are available. We also provide a simulation study in the paper to compare the new and conventional tests under different data scenarios. The results obtained are consistent with our asymptotic study. In addition we provide least squares estimators of those parameters used in the change‐point test together with their almost‐sure convergence properties.