OPTIMAL CHANGE-POINT ESTIMATION IN TIME SERIES

This paper establishes asymptotic theory for optimal estimation of change points in general time series models under alpha-mixing conditions. We show that the Bayes-type estimator is asymptotically minimax for change-point estimation under squared error loss. Two bootstrap procedures are developed to construct confidence intervals for the change points. An approximate limiting distribution of the change-point estimator under small change is also derived. Simulations and real data applications are presented to investigate the finite sample performance of the Bayes-type estimator and the bootstrap procedures.