Blockchain Papers

Ashoka Prabashwara, Patricia Menéndez, Liam Hodgkinson, Stuart Lee

Modern time series are often long, serially dependent, and non-stationary. Existing change-point methods either target specific changes or become computationally intensive when using nonparametric costs on long series. Many also require thresholds to be carefully calibrated under serial dependence. We introduce SCAN, an offline method for detecting multiple distributional change-points in long, serially dependent univariate time series. SCAN compares adjacent windows using an integral probability metric, calibrates local discrepancies with a dependence-aware bootstrap, and refines candidate locations using a scaled 1-Wasserstein criterion, enabling detection of changes in mean, variance, and broader distributional structure within a unified framework. An ensemble over multiple window sizes reduces sensitivity to window size and threshold specification. We establish consistency of the estimated number and locations of change-points under exponential alpha-mixing dependence, and show that the localization statistic reduces to a CUSUM-type statistic under pure mean shifts. In simulations with up to one million observations, SCAN generally achieves higher covering and F1-scores than competing methods across mean and joint mean-variance shifts, particularly under serial dependence. On real data, SCAN identifies labeled activity transitions in sensor data and interpretable structural changes in hourly Bitcoin prices. Implementations are available in the Python package scan-cpd and R package scanr.

Surojit Biswas, Buddhananda Banerjee

In this paper, we propose a distribution-free test for detecting changepoint in the mean direction of angular data. The uncertainty in angular measurements is quantified through the \textit{square of an angle}, derived from the intrinsic geometry of the torus. It is established that, under the null hypothesis, the test statistic distributionally converges to the Kolmogorov distribution, while under the alternative hypothesis, both the consistency of the test and the asymptotic properties of the changepoint estimator are established. Through extensive simulations, we compare the empirical performance of the proposed method with two existing approaches for angular data and further benchmark it against a test based on the circular arc length distance. Finally, we demonstrate the practical utility of our approach by analyzing the timestamps of extreme events in Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Gold price datasets, where the continuous, high-frequency nature of the data is modeled in the circular framework.