Use of Cumulative Sums of Squares for Retrospective Detection of Changes of Variance

Abstract This article studies the problem of multiple change points in the variance of a sequence of independent observations. We propose a procedure to detect variance changes based on an iterated cumulative sums of squares (ICSS) algorithm. We study the properties of the centered cumulative sum of squares function and give an intuitive basis for the ICSS algorithm. For series of moderate size (i.e., 200 observations and beyond), the ICSS algorithm offers results comparable to those obtained by a Bayesian approach or by likelihood ratio tests, without the heavy computational burden required by these approaches. Simulation results comparing the ICSS algorithm to other approaches are presented.